Consumer sovereignty is a postulate, not a given

You’ve got a broken blockquote going on here.

Are there examples of school choice, as modeled by the conservatarian/free marketeers, that work, that deliver a quality education for all vs threadbare universal schools and much better (better facilities, lower teacher/student ratios, more enrichment) choice schools? Everytime I hear this come up, it seems like a stalking horse for the elimination of universal public education by slow starvation locally or by removing all support for it at the federal level.

And how do we define parent satisfaction? Good grades? Admission to better-known universities? Test scores? Cost per student? Infrequency of phone calls about little Johnny’s shenanigans?

I think a lot of people, from across the political spectrum, would be surprised how much control parents already have over the classroom environment, how little control teacher and administrators have over student (and by extension parental) attitudes toward public education.

There would be all sorts of ways to have a choice of schools in the exaisting public system. That wouldn’t be the choice to send tax-payer money to a rich asshole who lives in another state, and that’s the only choice they care about. Personally I can’t wait till all schools spend 20% of their operating costs on advertising. Finally it’s not the parents that are the customers, it’s either the kids(who receive the education) or the public at large(who pay for it).

Toothbrushing is a universal human need. So why not government toothpaste companies, that only offer one option, financed by property taxes? I think it’s clear that we recognize the benefits of choice generally, but for some reason don’t expect that students will benefit from being able to access options that might be better for them, or are capable of assessing the benefits. Both of these are fairly strong assumptions.

Seems very difficult to separate out selection bias when discussing parent satisfaction in school choice. Those that choose vouchers are probably those most likely to be satisfied by them. My biggest concern about vouchers is that I see education as a public good that likely will not be well provided by the market.

I have one quibble, something that I think Cowen could trip you up on. You suggest that hard metrics should determine our judgments, as opposed to parent satisfaction. But unlike the drug-testing case, in the voucher case satisfaction IS a hard metric.

But I think the problem may be even deeper. You suggest that satisfaction is not explanatory, and I’m skeptical about this. The same explanatory problems can bedevil hard performance metrics. The problem as I see it, is that satisfaction only points to deeper explanations.

But take test performance. That’s a hard metric. As hard as you get really. But all test performance reveals is how many questions test takers get right. There are all kinds of deeper causal forces at work that are what we want.

The problem can’t be that satisfaction isn’t a hard metric; it can and has been measured. And for the reasons above, I don’t think it’s an explanatory problem either.

I can think of one move you could make that I’m pretty sure you won’t want to. The patient in the school case isn’t the parents. It’s the kids. But this leads to saying that parent satisfaction isn’t relevant. Student satisfaction would be, but they’re kids. I don’t think you want to go so far as to say that whether parents are satisfied with their children’s education doesn’t matter.

And that is another, different problem here. I don’t think anyone would completely dismiss parent satisfaction as relevant. But what you’re saying is that the reasons parents might be more satisfied can be morally suspect. And that’s also true.

But go back to test performance. Test performance can track along patterns of segregated student bodies rather than school quality. And parent satisfaction might track it, too. There are morally suspect causes at work in both, some of the same causes.

Some Lurker: measuring satisfaction isn’t that complicated. You’re overlooking the obvious. You just ask parents if they’re happy with their child’s school. And you can you do a simple yes/no, rate satisfaction on a numerical scale, etc.

Also of the three links in Tyler’s post: one is a 2 page 12 year old document hosted at a libertarian think tank, one is a poll run by and reported by a school-choice foundation, and one is a Bringam Young University law review article, by a professor who sits in a endowed chair for school choice. (Which makes much more modest claims). So, this all seems disinterested and trustworthy.

I can’t improve on Harry’s thoughtful comments so I’ll endorse them.

But I’m posting just to say that for my part It burns me up that my tax dollars are partially funding schools with religious–sometimes quite radically religious–agendas. I know what the courts have said about this, but the fact that my taxes support schools that teach that the universe is less than 10,000 years old and evolution never happened is anathema to me as an educator.

Everything is a toaster toothpaste!

Sorry, but Mr. Ladd’s perfect timing was too good to resist.

Henry’s critique of the weak article is solid. I’m reluctantly in favor of choice based on what I’ve read of positive results in select cases, on accounts from peers I respect regarding their experiences with charter schools, but principally because the current system in select demographics is failing, has been failing, and will continue to fail children and parents.

We don’t live in the US and our son attends a private high-school in Japan. Our greatest fear when we send him to school is that he will get sidetracked after school and end up emptying his wallet in a bookstore, karaoke box, or fast-food restaurant. He was, in the wake of the US elections, to discover that parents in many American communities have a very different set of fears.

Americans want to feel safe again. This is the great failure of the current system and the single most potent driver towards the loss of liberties and rights. I happen to know people who grew up in dictatorships and who look back fondly on their childhoods – raised in communities where people did not lock their doors. That’s how we grew up in Canada.

Public schools in America are not safe in many cases. The measures taken to provide baseline security in schools: metal detectors, random searches, guards do little in my opinion to reduce the fear and anxiety.

We need to think about what kind of world we want to provide for our kids and we lack both the time and the money, not to mention the data, for informed top-down across the board solutions. In the interim, Democrats will do far better to support school choice in communities that have expressed a strong interest in school choice.

Years ago I suggested somewhat in jest that we stop drug-testing students and start drug-testing parents, teachers, and administrators. The children are on the receiving end of our own cultural short-comings. The chickens are coming home to roost. Drug use is going to be an important theme, I suspect, of the new administration in their efforts? to rebuild America’s inner cities. Many here may feel relatively relaxed about the presence of drugs in schools, and the work-place. Many others are terrified.

Leave it to Beaver land may never have existed, but that doesn’t mean trying to build some level of stability and safety into local communities and schools isn’t a bad idea.

I will admit a basic prejudice. I don’t want my tax money going to private schools, particularly religion based ones.
I am willing to fund public schools that are available to everyone.

My daughter (now 20 and a university student) exercised her choice (I repeat, her choice, not her parents’ choice) when she was in her final year of primary education (at a government school) not to attempt the test for competitive entry to a (government) selective secondary school (she was the only student in her class not to take the test) and to apply (in the event, successfully) for entry to the specialist art and design stream at a (government) secondary school which also functioned as a generalist area school.

I am glad these choices were available to her. No vouchers were involved.

When the real question is ‘How (if at all) should public funds be used to subsidise choice of school?’, it is fraudulent to frame the question as ‘Is choice of school a good thing?’ I’m not opposed to the concept of choice of school, but when the question is how to allocate public funds, making sure that everybody has at least one good choice available to them is far more important than offering people more than one choice.

Also, when evaluating education, students are highly important, but parents are of little importance. I thought that as a student and I still think it as a parent.

Another point about framing: the substantive content of ‘we’re still not sure how well vouchers work’ is the same as the substantive content of ‘we’re still not sure how badly vouchers work’ or perhaps even ‘we’re still not sure how badly vouchers fail to work’.

There isn’t much choice of schools here in Canada unless you can afford to send your children to a very expensive private school, apart from the ability to move to a new catchment area. I agree with some of the comments above that I don’t want my taxes supporting religious schools—I want a strong, good public system. But here in Ontario there are two govt-funded systems, the public and the Catholic, which is stupid and expensive—the school bus costs alone mean that the idea of cancelling the Catholic school funding comes up regularly, but no politician will touch it. It is annoying to other religious groups who naturally would like their schools funded.

I actually have no opinion about parent choice because I have been so frustrated by the quality of Canadian schools—okay to good but never great—and yet more or less glad we don’t have the problem the States have of some terrific schools and some bad and dangerous and poor. It seems to me that the States has both the best education available and the worst, as I have said of its health care, and up here we have more uniformity but also more mediocrity.

I guess my question for Americans is, if there is parental choice available in schools, what is to ensure that the least desirable schools don’t get worse and worse, and the poorest people don’t get stuck with the worst education because they can’t afford to send their kids anywhere but the local school?

When the real question is ‘How (if at all) should public funds be used to subsidise choice of school?’, it is fraudulent to frame the question as ‘Is choice of school a good thing?

+1 (And since personal attacks on Prof. Cowen have been proscribed I shall merely say that while I’m not at all surprised that he should frame the issue in this way I am rather surprised to see that framing uncritically adopted by his liberal interlocutors.)

= = = Cowen’s is a similar standard of evidence I’ve seen from advocates of public education = = =

Free universal public education in government-operated (or, where contracted, with tight government oversight) had an excellent track record in North America from 1600 – 1980. Self-styled “charter schools” (most of which are actually for-profit money grabs) have an absolutely disastrous track record since 2000 with upwards of 80% failure rates. Nether Tyler Cowen nor Matthew Yglesias (another big proponent of for-profit K-12 schools) will ever discuss the colossal failure that was the Big Corporate – Imagine Schools charter experiment in St. Louis, for example, but that was a classic failure of the type. Why should people who advocate continuing a _highly successful system_ be required to ‘prove their case’ against he said/she said/opinions differ eristic arguements?

Having delved into satisfaction as metric in the context of the ACA, I think there’s plenty of suggestive evidence, though not by any means conclusive, that patient satisfaction does not track well with other outcomes. There’s some actuarial literature that fleshes things out a bit more, and the highest patient satisfaction scores are inversely correlated with institutions that have the best mortality/morbidity outcomes, as well as those with the worst. High satisfaction is essentially a phenomenon of the mushy middle, outcome-wise. And certainly, when there’s little else to differentiate care, that’s a fine metric to have. But it’s certainly not first in my mind when thinking about trying to build an institution intended to serve as a public good. Neither should it be for education, unless one thinks that an educated populace is not, in itself, a public good.

From Tyler Cohen: “To be sure, we’re still not sure how well vouchers work, and I would suggest continuing experimentation rather than full-on commitment. Frankly, I find a lot of the voucher advocates unconvincing, but let’s not forget the single most overwhelming (yet neglected) empirical fact about vouchers: they improve parent satisfaction.”

Isn’t NOLA a case study in the failure of vouchers? As I understand it, there is NO proof vouchers help STUDENTS. Charter & private schools are no better – and in some cases – significantly worse – than public schools.

Vouchers are being used to funnel public money to private (religious) schools. That’s disgusting. And wrong.

Re Harry @#25. When Indianapolis adopted a county-wide local government structure, that new structure carefully did not unify three services–two of which have since become unified (police & fire). The remaining service was, of course, public education. There continue to be at least 9 separate school systems in Indianapolis–the Indianapolis Public School system and 8 township public school systems. I leave it to the imagination of the commentariat to guess what the racial/ethnic makeup of the township school systems looked like in 1970.

I don’t give money to religious organizations.
They cannot be trusted not to evangelize.

My biggest concern is defunding the public schools. I went to a public school. Despite my bad attitude toward school. I consider those years a major factor in my egalitarian outlook on the world. I got along with the doctors’ and lawyers’ kids as well as the farmers’ and factory workers’ kids. Which I suspect was due to a unified school district. There was, and still is, one high school for the entire county.
So we did not have choice, but we had an adequate school.

What happens if everyone uses their voucher to go to the same public school? Presumably most of them get declined, but on what grounds?

More fundamentally, the chief beneficiary of public education is not the child or the parent but society – everyone is ensured that everyone around them has the same minimum standard of education. I don’t care what any parent thinks of the importance of topic x vs topic y, I insist that their child be taught to read and write and that’s what the public school system gets me. Framing education as a benefit for children or something parents should be satisfied with misses the real purpose of universal education. In this topic parents and children’s rights are and should be secondary to our shared social interests, and any choice they have should never be broad enough to enable them to undermine those interests. Most libertarian and republican education policy doesn’t get this, which is why it’s stupid and wrong.

“making sure that everybody has at least one good choice available to them is far more important than offering people more than one choice.”

But apparently we have problems doing that. Lots of inner city children aren’t currently offered even one good choice which is why black people are so overwhelmingly for vouchers. (Like 60-75% in favor).

This is true even in places where Democrats have been in charge for decades–see California and New York City. And spending per pupil is well above almost any large Western country.

The debate has been going round and round forever, and at the very least I don’t see evidence that voucher schools tend to be any worse on average than public schools. (There have been voucher disasters, but there have been larger public school disasters as well).

The parental satisfaction thing is interesting because the rest of the stats don’t show much difference and don’t show much if any damage to the public schools. So either the parents are on to something we aren’t capturing in the formal statistics (which is highly possible), or they are just unreasonably happy about it while doing no serious harm.

[Sidenote, One thing I find fascinating is the function of ‘high stakes’ testing in the debate. If a voucher school does worse on the tests, it is proof that the school sucks. If a voucher school does well on the tests, it is proof that it is hoarding the good students. If no voucher school exists in the district, suddenly teachers argue that high stakes testing is useless and can’t measure anything.]

Cranky Observer@31

“Free universal public education in government-operated (or, where contracted, with tight government oversight) had an excellent track record in North America from 1600 – 1980.”

You forgot two words: “for whites.” Important words, though.

I don’t believe most charter schools in the US are for-profit, though I could be wrong. Boston, with a large minority population, has shown dramatically better results for (nonprofit) charter schools than public schools, not just on state tests, but on SATs, AP courses, and the proportion who go to four-year rather than two-year colleges. This undoubtedly wouldn’t be true in the wealthy suburbs, which have outstanding schools. But, though I myself am a public school grad (from one of those suburbs), before we get all dewy-eyed about public schools let’s just recall how many decades Boston spent giving systematically worse education to minority students.

http://www.academia.edu/28319737/Stand_and_Deliver_Effects_of_Bostons_Charter_High_Schools_on_College_Preparation_Entry_and_Choice

Donald A. Coffin

Really?? You really think that the preferences of six-year-olds should have a greater weight than the preferences of parents? This ultimately has to fit into the governance of schools, and unless there’s a lot of faith in elites (not that there’s anything wrong with that…) parents’ preferences are going to play a role, particularly in a very decentralized system like the US.

The focus on “choice” implies that parents’ preferences regarding schools, and patients regarding hospitals. differ in important respects (for example, regarding the subject offerings). I don’t think that’s right. Parents want their kids to go to a “good” school, and patients want to get well. For any given set of schools and hospitals, these are essentially positional goods. The problems is how to increase the supply of good schools and hospitals, not (primarily) to reshuffle the assignment of students/patients to slots.

Harry @26: Isn’t the correct response here to get rid of local funding of schools?

1) Here in Toronto, Ontario our son had any number of choices of high school within the public system, and not just in our catchment area. There were art-focussed schools, enriched science and math schools (he picked one and loved it), IB schools, and many others. As others have said, school choice can be available within a fully public system. (Actually, one thing driving this in Toronto seems to be the decline in the school-age population, which has led high schools that used to be full with local kids to add special programs to attract students from farther away and avoid being half empty.)

2) A question: quite apart from what it’s a response to, might parental satisfaction with a school not have good effects, e.g. by getting parents more involved with the school and with their kids’ education? As I recall, Robert Putnam thinks that’s one factor that promotes educational success and is more characteristic of upper-income vs. lower-income families.

What I fear about school choice, is the same thing that I am observing about news-supplier choice, which came about because of cable TV, and has been accelerated by the internet. The later has given us two countries, each with their own incompatible set of assumptions and even things that are accepted as facts. So we risk bifurcating the country along the worldview fault-line. Now we want to start hammering another wedge, based upon the different package of things we were taught in school. We could soon end up with an extremely tribal society, with our politics resembling that of some African countries, where whatever tribe happens to prevail in the last election lords if over the losing tribe (our time). That’s already what Trumpism feels like to the liberal tribe. We can only be so different and still remain viable as a country.

The “parent satisfaction” assertion is the Simpsons Paradox wine in a new bottle. Having failed to prove that charter schools are better TC repeats the same statistical fallacy with an almost identical set of data.

Shameless.

Electricity and water and much else have been done. Now it’s education. Then…policing, maybe? I recall a very senior Australian bureaucrat musing about the virtues of mercenary armies. As in “let’s see what the magic of the market can do to defence”. This is what an ideology looks like as it consumes itself.

kidneystones

When public school systems are failing students across the board, families should not be denied the freedom to seek out/organize an alternative. We already see this developing with home-schooling.

That’s a red herring. What is at issue here is not any denial to families of the freedom to organise alternatives; there is no such denial. What is at issue here is the allocation of public funds.

From the purely political point of view, there are real risks to the Democratic party if the party continues to deliver so little to inner-city residents, and to those in rural communities.

There’s no more (and no less truth) in that than there would be in saying there are real risks to the Republican Party if it continues to deliver so little to inner-city residents and to rural communities. The Republicans are not (or, have not been) delivering any more to inner-city residents and rural communities than the Democrats are (or have been).

And navigating back to the original topic, no support has been demonstrated for the conclusion that school vouchers will result in delivering more to inner-city residents and to rural communities.

I know it’s a while back, but Watson Ladd @7, it’s called water fluoridation.

Anyway. I find it kind of interesting with the choice argument that while for education certain conservative/libertarian thinkers are gung ho about letting parents have as much choice as possible under the assumption they necessarily make the best, most informed choices. Especially low income parents. Yet when the subject is food stamps for example there is a lot of talk about the sub optimal choices recipients make (e.g. chips and soda) such that we need to greatly limit and regulate the choices available to food “voucher” users regardless of how “satisfied” the consumers may be with their choices.

The idea parent satisfaction can be meaningful for a product which doesn’t necessarily show how effective it was until years after it was used seems circumspect. How Timmy likes/does well in math class during the 3rd grade might not be so important or meaningful until we see how he does in math class in the 9th grade. But at that point it is impossible to retroactively go back and redo 3rd grade math with a different provider.

A good point raised elsewhere in the comments is choice and voucherizing education serves to reinforce ideological polarization which we have seen increasingly in media and other areas or institutions which used to provide a common or shared experience. Though arguably the increase in residential segregation by ideology might make the local public school less of a unifying experience than maybe it was in the past. It’s difficult trade off. Choice will always increase segregation as people’s choices might be similar to the choices made by people who share a race/political ideology/religion/etc. If we want to provide common experiences or decrease segregation of any sort it requires limiting choice and at least in the context of racial segregation limiting choice (forced bussing for example) turned out to be very unpopular for certain groups.

First, I would want to distinguish very carefully between parental satisfaction and parental preference. Saying that you’ve lived with the effects of a voucher system – i.e. that you’ve put a child through school in an area with vouchers in operation – and you like the results: that’s parental satisfaction. Parents saying they’d like to be able to choose tells us nothing – ceteris paribus, who wouldn’t prefer “have a choice” to “have no choice”? Apart from anything else, parents are likely to assume the choice would work out well for them. We’re seeing a particularly glaring example of this thought process in the UK at the moment, with calls for the return of grammar schools. Grammar schools were selective, and by their nature guaranteed that 75% of the school population would receive a non-grammar-school education. Since nobody on the pro-grammar side of the debate is arguing for a separate-but-equal system – in which grammars cream off the brainiacs while the rest of the school system gives the normal kids just as good an education – the inference has to be that everybody on that side assumes their kid would be in the top 25%.

Second, any introduction of choice in the system needs to look at its effects on the system as a whole. Again, schools with a strong academic orientation would be good for all those weirdoes who write in paragraphs and think in subordinate clauses, but if introducing (more of) those schools is likely to reduce the quality of schooling for the much larger number of kids who don’t go to them, the trade-off isn’t worth it.

These seem like really basic points, but I don’t see much sign that the advocates of parental choice have answers to them.

@59 efcdons 12.04.16 at 6:39 am

“certain conservative/libertarian thinkers are gung ho about letting parents have as much choice as possible under the assumption they necessarily make the best, most informed choices. ”

This, of course, is a straw man.
The assumption is not that the parents will make the best choice: it is that they will do a better choice than the State bureaucrats, since they a) have a more compelling interest than the state and b) know their kid better.
(On the other hand, they probably don’t know much about best practices in teaching…).

. . . the mercurial nature of the Trump strategy. Betsy may be the person to usher in the vouchers, but she’s as unlikely as any to still hold her job in two, or four years.

Some of Trump’s appointments may be easily replaceable, but some represent alliances with power groups in the Republican Party, and so can’t be fired without consequences. Mrs. DeVos’ ties to the Michigan Republican Party, and the evangelical right, not to mention billions of dollars (Amway) and even a private army (Blackwater) probably protect her from being converted into a scapegoat and fired.

The elephant in the room: why are most schools in the US so mediocre at best, so focused on preparation for exams which measure lifetime useless skills and information, so tough on kids at any extreme of anything, so laden with homework and anxiety? For the people I know, support for school vouchers results from these frustrations, which nobody wants to deal with. I supported more charters on the ballot, not because I want the money to go there (I don’t) but because I have no evidence that the public schools have a clue of how to get better, and I hope that competition will change things. In our town the charter school has the least $$ and is by far the best around, including the private schools, and they don’t even notice when the exams are coming. They just perform.

Howard @45:
“Really?? You really think that the preferences of six-year-olds should have a greater weight than the preferences of parents? This ultimately has to fit into the governance of schools, and unless there’s a lot of faith in elites (not that there’s anything wrong with that…) parents’ preferences are going to play a role, particularly in a very decentralized system like the US.”

My point is that Cowen is inconsistent in his argument. If it’s consumer preferences that are supposed to be so important, then we should be paying attention to consumer preferences. Cowen does a bait-and-w=switch here, that’s all.

No, parents do want different schools. Some parents want schools that teach lots of languages. Others want schools that are less pressure cookery and focus more on art, etc. But even if we assume all parents want similar things, public education might not provide them as well as market-based alternatives. Some charters like KPP have delivered. Others have not. Parents will pick those that deliver, and not the ones that don’t, and this in theory should lead to the bad ones failing. By contrast public schools continue to fail for decades in some cities, with no evident force to improve them. And no, it isn’t the spending so much as management failures.

I’m skeptical outcomes can’t be measured quickly for education. Tests tend to measure what students know, and are given fairly soon after classes.

As for resources, that’s an orthogonal question. Society can pump more resources into education regardless of how it is delivered. However, charter schools and vouchers could threaten to hurt integration of children with disabilities. Section 504 and the IDEA don’t apply to private schools, and I don’t think most parents would send normally developing children to a school that educates a more diverse population without a strong commitment to integration.

The most severe issue with school choice in practice is the frequent lack of meaningful oversight. Here in Ohio, for instance, it appears that a large online school (ECOT) is going down in flames after many profitable years. Basically, the state eventually discovered that students could log in for an hour every few weeks and be treated as having full attendance.

Like surgery, the harm from outright scams and frauds isn’t fixed by the market God.

“Eliminating child poverty in America is complicated and not easily moralised and doesn’t fit into the ‘stylised’ tribal demands of either Left or Right?”

No. What’s complicated and not easily moralised etc is what to do given the complete lack of political will for eliminating (or even significantly reducing) child poverty in America. A clue: Bernie’s signature issues were trade, bankers, and free college education, not eliminating child poverty.

Education as an issue is an utter mess because there is no consensus as to what it is for. Business wants the education system to magically produce workers that satisfy its every need. Parents want schools to make sure their kids magically find a job at a level that avoids humiliation for the family name. Teachers want to make sure that kids magically achieve some sort of level of attainment that ensures that they don’t get sacked. The government wants to make sure that statistics demonstrate that children are just as qualified as those in China.

No one thinks of asking the kids about what they might want to know or achieve.

Henry was not suggesting that tecnocratic fine tuning is needed instead of political confrontation. His comment was made in the context of approving my comment that eliminating child poverty is the only way we know of that might get large gains in educational achievement, and asking people not to lose sight of that when arguing about choice.

And of course we need political confrontation. But until that is successful schools need to be run, districts and state legislators need to make decisions, the Department of Education makes its decisions, unions at the school, district, state and national levels naturally want some input on those decisions. Some decisions are better, others are worse, its hard to judge which in many cases even with a lot of contextual knowledge, and it just is morally fraught because as a governor, legislator, administrator, teacher, etc your choices have real effects on vulnerable people. So, yes, organisational details really matter, whether we have a political confrontation or not.

J-D @25 nails it:
“making sure that everybody has at least one good choice available to them is far more important than offering people more than one choice”

The political economy of voucher systems is such that almost all such systems will ensure that a large minority of children, in time possibly even a majority, will be denied any good choice. Universal state-provided education is one political economy equilibrium, selective private provided education another.

Can you solve child poverty without addressing poverty, full stop? Children have no say in or control over their socio-economic status so I don’t see a lot of value in referring to child poverty as a separate issue. I see three of Bernie Sanders’ Top Five issues address this directly. Shame that none of those issues resonated with people.

As noted above, there is an argument that parents are capable of making good decisions about where to send their children to school but they cannot make good decisions about the food they buy. We’ll give poor people money to spend if it means they use it to weaken the public schools but we won’t give them money to feed themselves/their kids if we can’t control how they spend it. That kind of moralitarian thinking seems be baked into a lot of this stuff.

Were schools better in the 50s, 60s, and 70s? Objectively better, not just through our hazy memories? How did we know? What were the metrics? We had standardized tests in the 70s, I remember taking them, but they were not state-administered as they often are now. So why did we add that? Parental demand for accountability, no? Because bad teachers are the reason why schools are getting worse, right? Not less well-prepared or stressed out students, living in economic insecurity, with less parental involvement (two career households becoming more common).

Standardized testing is all about grading teachers and school districts, not about student achievement. The war on public education is more than 100 years old where I live. If public schools could get rid of kids who threatened to ruin their scores, as charter schools can do, things would be very different. Making parents accountable for their students and themselves would be a big improvement.

I see all this stuff everyday, the rise in anxiety in kids that probably can’t even spell it, the behaviors and attitudes and what they say about home life for kids. I don’t see Betsy DeVos doing much to change that. I don’t see the likes of Tyler Cowen offering any solutions either.

To Igor Belanov @ 77, public schools were intended to be academies of democracy, where students learned how we collectively got here and why it was important to continue that work. Here in Washington, we have enshrined what John Adams said in the state constitution:

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense and at the public expense of the people themselves.

But we never worked out how to pay for it.

Trouble is, as you say, no one remembers what the purpose of education is. Is it to make educated citizens or simply consumers at varying levels of affluence? We made white collar careers a priority but now how do we cope when those jobs are threatened? Do we really want our children to be in the trades?

@Kurt Schuler: That only says something about District of Columbia Public Schools, a degenerate case even among degenerate cases. A hell of a lot of the DC elite live in the suburbs and send their kids to Montgomery/Fairfax/Loudoun/etc. public schools.

“Well established”? Maybe in Sparta…

Seriously, the default assumption (at least in liberal societies) is that parents are quite capable and willing to take care of their kids, and have the right to choose the best way to educate them; but in exceptional circumstances the state can intervene.
In an analogous way as the default assumption is that a person is capable and willing of taking care of himself and not a danger to other people, but in exceptional circumstances the state can put him in an asylum.

Seriously, the default assumption (at least in liberal societies) is that parents are quite capable and willing to take care of their kids, and have the right to choose the best way to educate them; but in exceptional circumstances the state can intervene.

“Conditional on an absence of state disapproval [beyond a certain level]” has exactly the same denotative meaning as “conditional on state approval [of a certain level]”.

Each week, food is packed for 6-11-year-olds who suffer from “food insecurity” (these euphemisms – who can’t we just say “for children who have no food at home”?)

No. Because, see, if you did some prize fucking arsehole will say, “but they have half a mouldy apple, so it’s not like they have no food”.

[which, yes: problems with linguistic implication, no?]

I guess my question for Americans is, if there is parental choice available in schools, what is to ensure that the least desirable schools don’t get worse and worse, and the poorest people don’t get stuck with the worst education because they can’t afford to send their kids anywhere but the local school?

This is a feature, not a bug, of the proposed system. More generally, it is very important to keep in mind in such debates that the implicit assumption that everybody wants good education to be universally accessible is just unwarranted; on the contrary, generally speaking, élites have a direct personal interest in educational standards being relatively poor and unequal (because the lower the universal standard, the higher the advantages accrued by their birth will be for their own children and the more rigid social reproduction will be). In a world with inequalities as staggering as ours, the top 5 to 10% have a direct interest in the children of the bottom 30% receiving a subpar eduction as well as the mean to ensure that this happens. Then many choices suddenly make perfect sense, starting with the common disregard of child poverty noted by Harry.

I’ll rephrase it.

TC says “satisfied people are satisfied”.

So what?

Finding that people playing slot machines at Los Vegas really like playing slot machines doesn’t mean that we should use public money to put slot machines on every street corner in the county.

This discussion is taking place at a pretty high level of generality, as I’m sure the coming political discussion will. Here’s a pretty solid piece of research that concludes:

Massachusetts’ urban charter schools generate large achievement gains, while non-urban charters appear to be largely ineffective and appear to reduce achievement for some.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w17332.pdf

For “urban”, of course, read”inner city.”

And this, in turn, is a separate discussion from the one about vouchers.

J-D@54

I don’t have kids, but I though it was pretty widely accepted that parents sometimes have to override kids’ preferences in those kids’ interests. Perhaps this is applied more broadly than it should be. But we clearly don’t credit kids with full rationality in, for example, the criminal justice system. Personally, I wouldn’t want to change that.

Howard — I think its fair to say that as far as we can tell charter schools do well for poor kids compared to alternatives in some places (New Orleans), badly in others (Detroit), so-so in others (DC) and… so on. On average, charter schools do about as well as traditional publics across the country as far as we can tell, and maybe a little better for low-income children in particular from black and hispanic backgrounds. We have pretty good evidence concerning KIPP, that they do well for the kids when it comes to traditional measures of success.

cs: we know very little about the effects charters have on the traditional public schools with which they compete, or that vouchers have. A matter for further research. I completely agree, as do all serious researchers, that we cannot assume the effects are not negative, but we shouldn’t assume they are negative, either. Its an empirical matter, hard to decide. The whole debate is fogged by ideology, and its a good idea to attend to what evidence there is.

Howard Frant

J-D@54

I don’t have kids, but I though it was pretty widely accepted that parents sometimes have to override kids’ preferences in those kids’ interests.

I don’t know. Perhaps it is widely accepted (or not widely accepted but still ‘pretty widely accepted’, whatever that means), but what of that? Something can be widely accepted and utterly wrong.

However, if you pay as close attention to exactly what I wrote as I did myself, you will see that it is fully compatible with the view that parents sometimes have to override children’s preferences in their children’s interests. I did not write that children’s preferences should override all other considerations; I wrote that in relation to their own lives their preferences should carry greater weight than the preferences of their parents (and, I would add, the preferences of anybody else).

Perhaps this is applied more broadly than it should be.

There, plainly, we agree (except that I would change ‘perhaps’ to ‘certainly’.

But we clearly don’t credit kids with full rationality in, for example, the criminal justice system. Personally, I wouldn’t want to change that.

I don’t know what you’re referring to there.

Brett Dunbar

How much evidence is there that what you describe as ‘a fairly simple consequence of market theory’ is generally reflected in what happens in actual markets?

Electricity and water and much else have been done. Now it’s education. Then…policing, maybe?

Trump advisors aim to privatize oil-rich Indian reservations

Harry: “We have pretty good evidence concerning KIPP, that they do well for the kids when it comes to traditional measures of success.”

Be exceedingly careful with these kinds of claims. The easiest game in the world for these kinds of high-profile outfits is to play fast and loose with the representativeness and scalability of either their model (e.g. relying on Gates/Walton/Broad/etc. money to fund a level of services nobody but the starriest-eyed lefties would propose to provide systemically for impoverished students writ large) or their student body (e.g. by relying on high-effort opt-in screening and admissions procedures to ensure that their student body consists largely of the most motivated students and families in their target demographic). KIPP in particular is well known for its extreme reluctance to accept transfer students to replace those who move, drop out, or otherwise leave, meaning that by definition it drops the ball on one of the single most disruptive effects of systemic poverty — dislocation and migration — in a way that would be impossible for a public school system writ large to sweep under the rug. One can charitably call this an earnest effort to isolate a narrow and easily measurable student population of interest and experiment with solutions to their specific problems, or one can uncharitably call it a cynical and self-interested ideological ploy to pretend that their model offers some kind of solution to broader problems neither they nor the people who parrot their press releases are genuinely interested in actually solving… tomayto tomahto.

Mr. Coffin @ 37:

I was a high school student in Indianapolis in 1970. (Catholic school, my choice, my parents could pay the freight.)

In 1970, Indianapolis was, by a large margin, the most openly racist place I’ve ever been. The number and frequency of racist words–not just the n-word–among people of all ages was staggering and we had just moved from Houston. When I discovered how much influence the Klan had on Indiana politics, especially in the 20s and 30s, doing a social science project when I was junior at said HS, my reaction, was, “Yes. That makes sense.”

It hasn’t changed all that much, although some of the suburban schools are a little less pristine than they used to be.

WLGR @100

The education system in the US as in any literally any other advanced human society isn’t designed to create widespread freedom and equality, foster a universally enlightened citizenry, solve our social and economic ills, “lift people out of poverty”, or any of that ideological pablum. On a purely practical material level, it’s designed to continually raise generations of children to take the places left by their elders in the existing arrangement of society, a stratified and unequal arrangement based on intractable class antagonisms. In many societies with some measure of formal legal equality, notably the US, it also takes on an ideological burden of obscuring this de facto stratification with a facade (however transparent and flimsy) of universal access to basic developmental ingredients

This ignores or at least fails to mention the fact that the reproduction of class stratification is imperfect, as a certain of number of students do not “take the place of their elders” in the class hierarchy, but move up it. (An example that comes to mind is B. Carson, whom Trump has just named to his Cabinet.) Conversely, some others go in the opposite direction.

That reproduction of hierarchy is imperfect means that the system is not achieving what WLGR says are its goals in an efficient manner, which in turn means that there are openings to make the reproduction of hierarchy still more imperfect, by pushing toward a system where the “facade” of “universal access to basic development ingredients” becomes progressively less of a facade and more a reality. Not that education in this kind of society will ever be able to be the *main* means of dealing with poverty and inequality, but since WLGR — given his doctrinaire, dogmatic brand of Leftism — believes that severe inequality is ineradicable in a capitalist society, he can, on the one hand, state that the point of education under capitalism is the reproduction of class stratification and, on the other, rest assured that no other mechanisms exist in a capitalist society to reduce inequality significantly.

This is akin to the mistake Marx made in Critique of the Gotha Program, where he asserted that no capitalist society could redistribute income to any significant degree, since, in Marx’s words, “the distribution of the means of consumption” depends on and stems from the underlying arrangement of the forces and relations of production, i.e., on the mode of production . That this particular proposition happens to be false — capitalist societies are in fact able to redistribute income — has not stopped people like WLGR from assuming that every institution in a capitalist society is devoted almost exclusively to reproducing hierarchy and stratification and further assuming, incorrectly, that the “flimsy” ideological facade is so flimsy that it can’t be used as a wedge to create real reforms.

If you approach these issues from the assumption that no meaningful reform is possible under capitalism, you’re going to conclude that, no matter the domain under discussion — education, health, foreign policy, economic policy, etc. — no meaningful reform is possible under capitalism. One starts from a premise and ends up with that same premise, and the intervening steps merely become an excuse to lecture supposedly gullible left-liberals and social democrats about their ostensible naivete and failure to grasp the all-encompassing Marxist truths.

“School choice” strikes me as merely the means of replacing democratic choice with consumer choice. To me, whether some (or many? Cowen simply doesn’t specify) parents would rather choose their child’s development in the same manor as they choose what color of jeans to buy, is simply beside the point. There is a lot to lose in removing public, democratic choice from our education system, and quite frankly no “school choice” advocate has even come close to making a decent case of why removing local control is of any benefit whatsoever to our communities.

And to be perfectly honest, I don’t even think there is a case to be made. Because why stop at limiting democratic control of our school systems? If consumer choice is so good, why have democratic control at all?

People in poor areas already have “food choice” – they can go anywhere to buy their food, unrestricted by catchment areas or state interference. Yet obesity and diabetes are concentrated in poor areas, because their free “choice” is restricted by what the free market offers to poor areas. If supermarkets can act to effectively constrain food choices in poor areas, why would anyone assume schools will be different? In reality the “choice” of school is still restricted by location and transport options, and no doubt there will be a premium applied to fees so that people in these areas get less for the same price just as they do when buying food. When analyzing this rhetoric of choice we need to consider how the choices are restricted.

before expanding choice, it seems to me that the state needs to simply put more money and effort into public schools and to alleviating child poverty. But no doubt once this program fails the republicans will find a way to blame it on certain people, and walk away unscathed as always…

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/shuttering-of-imagine-charter-schools-in-st-louis-is-daunting/article_ec4adf66-bde4-5e11-91d2-baca703df156.html
ST. LOUIS • As they move to close down a network of St. Louis charter schools over the next several weeks, state education officials face a task as monumental and complicated as dismantling an entire school district.

As many as 3,800 children — or about 11 percent of those attending public schools in the city — must find new schools. Their records must be properly preserved and transferred. The school buildings they attended have to be scoured for equipment and materials paid for with federal funds. The 288 teachers and staff who work at the schools must have a better idea of their remaining pay and benefits. And that’s not counting the thousands of questions by parents who demand answers.

Charter schools in Missouri have closed in the past. But never on this scale.= = =

It is worth the time to read the Post-Dispatch’s coverage of this charter school disaster (to get some links search for: stltoday imagine schools failure). An absolute failure of the sort that charter schools proponents claim won’t happen because markets. And anyway, parents can always change schools. [what happened to the 3,800 K-6 kids referenced in the quote? 90% of them were dumped back into the deeply troubled and struggling St. Louis Public School system, which (a) had already been badly damaged by the departure of those students 3 years earlier (b) had no choice but to to accept them and try to figure out what to do. ]

The for-profit division of Imagine, to which the corporate sponsors of these charters had turned when they realized that running a school for more than 1-2 years is very difficult, gave the money back when the experiment failed. Ha! I kid – they kept all the money for their executives and investors. That’s one aspect of a response to Howard Frant’s 2:33 am comment: many charters are founded as non-profits, but when the initial enthusiasm fades and the founding group of parents ages out the organization often finds there is no replacement group willing to make the school their life’s work for little remuneration, so they turn to for-profit “school management firms” such as Imagine to run the thing. That typically lasts 2-3 years; once the cash is extracted the contract is not renewed and the charter fails.

Running a school over a long period of time is hard, and people who work hard at making it successful tend to want to be paid. Which is where the UFT and CTU came in…

The given is that people of mobility and wealth can and do ‘choose’ the schools they prefer for their kids. Indeed, the ability to choose careers, places of employment, and places of residence are the three most reliable metrics by which we mark the differences between the wealthy and the poor. We, the wealthy, understand that different communities offer different benefits. A very few offer a diverse range of choices both in terms of quality and variety. We exercise our choices accordingly.

Harry makes clear what the evidence suggests. Inner-city and rural communities are ‘poor’ in the truest sense because the lack the means to exercise the same choices that we the wealthy exercise at will. A few have the temerity to deny the poor the right to exercise choice on the only level they can. This seems to me wrong, short-sighted, and even cruel.

Yes, charter schools should be monitored, and monitored carefully. But please do not tell the poor they will have to wait for the great age of equality before then can exercise the same rights we the wealthy appear to be taking for granted.

“An absolute failure of the sort that charter schools proponents claim won’t happen because markets.”

Not the charter advocates I know. They anticipate there will be such disasters, exactly because it is hard to run schools well, and many will fail. The upside of markets is supposed to be that when charter fail eventually they close, whereas public schools…

Picking out charter school (or voucher school) failures sheds no more light than cherry picking charter school (or voucher school) successes.

There are plenty of reasons for being skeptical that for-profits will be successful in providing quality schooling in rich countries. Only a small minority of charter schools are for-profits; in fact only a minority are run by CMOs.

And, to keep this in perspective, even now charter schools account for a much smaller proportion of school students than private schools do (6% ish)

Yes, I agree that moving between schools is really bad for kids (even when it is planned, and even when the move is between reasonably good schools!, let alone when it is from bad to bad). That’s one good reason against choice, and its a good reason for investing heavily in transition when school closures of any kind occur. Sorry — I see how the word ‘cherry picking’ came off; I agree, we need a full and honest reporting. The truth is that probably too few charter schools fail, but the thing about traditional public schools is that even when they fail they don’t close. In my experience many proponents of traditional public schools play up the problems with charters and downplay the problems with traditional public schools; and many charter/voucher advocates do the reverse. leading to both painting a distorted picture.

Harry@26: “catchment area”? I think you might mean “school district.”

Most school districts in the US are a form of independent local government, described and defined in their respective state’s constitution (some big cities have mayoral control). As a local government, they have legal jurisdictional boundaries — just like a city has “limits,” so does a school district.

The district is run by democratically-elected leadership, known as the “school board.”
All citizens living within the district, whether they have children in the schools or not, can vote in elections for the school board, and even run for office themselves.

Similarly, all who live in the district, whether or not they have children, must support it through taxes (as an analogy, I don’t use my city’s golf course but I help pay for it).

As a form of government, school districts must treat all alike. The district can not choose which students they will accept, they must accept all. (This by the way, is the basis for special ed law. Disabled children must be given the same civil right to a free, public schooling as their typically-developing peers.)

If a child has behavioral issues that may merit suspension or expulsion, due process must be followed. Private schools of course do not have any of these obligations when it comes to their student bodies.

Also, school districts must have open meetings and open records (with the exception of records on individual students which enjoy privacy protections). The financial books are public information.

All this is by way of saying this: to me, the most disturbing aspect of charters, vouchers and other efforts to privatize education is that it works to disappear an entire level of democratic government.

@116
Despite your ridiculously inflammatory mischaracterization of democratic control being synonymous with children “being owned by the state”, I think you are on to something that our system of universal schooling has proven to be the best answer.

Ohio Mom — I really did mean catchment area. School districts find ingenious ways to treat children differently. So, for example, in a nearby district adjacent elementary schools have free-and-reduced-lunch rates of 20% and 80% respectively, and (as far as I can tell, judging by the seniority levels of the teaching staff in each school) the district spends more per student in the school with 20% free and reduced lunch. The district chooses not to redraw the boundaries in order to equalize the free and reduced lunch rates because the parents of the more privileged children would make a large fuss and many would probably defect to private schools or move to nearby districts with very low free and reduced lunch rates (where, incidentally, denizens pay lower real estate taxes, enjoying the benefits of a large pool of low wage labor in the city without having to pay for the services that population needs). If you can afford a house in one catchment area the government treats you much better than if you can’t. There is choice, and ample inequality, within the traditional public school system.

And just to say that charter schools in most states are bound by many of the same rules as traditional public schools. They are, indeed, under less direct control from school districts (though that varies enormously by state, but they are always authorized and regulated by authorities empowered by democratically elected bodies (state legislatures) which frankly enjoy more democratic legitimacy than most school boards do (much higher proportions of the electorate vote in state-level elections than in school board elections). They are all required to admit by lottery when oversubscribed. (Which is not to say there is no selection: they can skew the applicant pool in various ways and in places like NYC do so apparently with abandon!).

On the disappearing of an entire level of democratic government: this opens up a whole new can of worms but I have always wondered whether the spectacularly low voting rates in the US have anything to do with the spectacularly large number of levels of government (school board, county board, city council, mayoralty, local DA, sheriff, local judges; state assembly, state senate, AG, other state level offices, Governor, state judges, House of Reps, Senate, Presidency; and primaries for everything…). Losing just one level of government might not be such a disaster.

As an educator and one who very strongly agrees that universal public education is very much a public good, perhaps the most important, I’m slightly troubled by the level of disconnect in some circles. The most widely-read article at RCP is on the re-election of Nancy Pelosi and the catastrophic impact for Democrats in coming elections. Leaving that aside for the moment, here’s a snapshot of the current lay of the land:

“Democratic control in state legislative bodies is in its weakest spot since the Civil War; Republicans now hold control of a record 68 percent of the 98 state legislative chambers in the nation. In total they hold 4,100 of the 7,383 seats, more than they have held since 1920.”

If this seems like Democrats are ‘winning’ the public debates on the issues, I’d hate to see defeat. Yes, the GOP doesn’t play fair. But it was teachers themselves who elected to withdraw from teachers’ unions in Wisconsin. It’s possible everything flips and Democrats make record gains in 2018. That scenario is based far more on ‘hope’ than evidence. Advocates of universal health care where everyone gets great free health care and great public education make worthy arguments. Problem is people are looking for results, not higher health-care premiums and less choice.

Education is going to undergo a variety of changes, some of which I personally find horrifying. I’m unable to reverse many/any of these. There is a new marshal in town. Democratic arguments and candidates leave the electorate cold. Voters want some fresh thinking and fresh solutions. Some of these will come from outside the orthodoxies of the 20th century.

We have ample evidence (for example, from the University of Phoenix and similar firms) that for-profits do a very bad job in education and other human services, and there are obvious explanations – it’s much easier and more profitable to game a public financing system than it is to improve education.

So, the fact that the share of for-profit charters, including “non-profits” where most of the services are provided by for-profit “education management organizations”, is increasing steadily should be enough to signal that something is going badly wrong.

Faustusnotes @ 115

Food deserts are basically mythical. Poor areas are served by supermarkets which have a broad range of products. Healthy food is available to anyone who wants to buy it. What is true is there is less of it in the shops. That is simply a response to consumer preference. The urban poor choose to buy more processed food and cook from scratch less than richer people. Time skill and confidence are constraints not availability of ingredients.

faustusnotes @124 objections to parents meddling with education apply equally to any kind of consumer choice: exactly the same words can be applied to someone deciding in which hotel to stay.

As I said, there is a practical claim that in the case of education individuals don’t have enough information/time to pick up the good options among the bad ones: but that is a claim that needs to be backed up by evidence.
To make a comparison, the evidence in healthcare seems quite strong that universal health care is cheaper and better quality than the USA system.

@118 Cranky Observer 12.06.16 at 1:36 am
“Children are citizens and individual human beings, not anyone’s property”

Children are wards: the question is, ward of the state or of their parents? If you think that the state usually does a better job than the parents, I suppose that the idea of sending a kid to a foster house doesn’t sound so bad.

“Respect for the autonomous right to make choices doesn’t require as much evidence as claims based on consumer sovereignty ”

The problem is that it is the PARENTS making the choice, but in this case it is not clear that they are in fact the customer.

Deny the poor the right to choose.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-08-23/why-does-the-naacp-oppose-charter-schools

And from my old favorite WGBH:

http://news.wgbh.org/2016/10/25/politics-government/charter-schools-its-issue-civil-rights

Kurt Schuler: “I believe that every U.S. president in my lifetime other than Jimmy Carter has sent his children to private schools for most or all of their primary and secondary education.”

Similarly, every U.S. president in your lifetime has been driven around in an armored car accompanied by armed guards. This could be because they don’t trust their own driving skills, or it could be for some other reason…

The urban poor choose

Men make their own dinners, but they do not make them as they please.

Fuck sake.

@ Harry, the argument still applies: There will not be enough private schools to accommodate choice for all low-income students, so many low-income students will not have a choice. Voucher programs basically take tax revenues garnered outside the poor school district, and bring those funds into the poor school district, to the benefit of only some of the students in that poor school district. If that’s we’re going to do – have people who live in wealthier, better school districts pay for better schools in poorer school districts – why don’t we just get on with doing that? Why the complicated mechanism which by design can’t accommodate all the kids in those poor school districts anyway? I think the answer is ‘we can’t get wealthy people to agree to that’, or perhaps ‘we can’t get conservatives, who hate public education anyway, to agree to that’. If so, and if this is something we can get them to agree to, why do you think that is the case? Perhaps because it is consistent with their goal to eliminate public schools?

Layman, why do you assume that new private schools won’t start up in response to vouchers giving more students the means to access them?

Private markets work in food, and toothpaste, and transportation, and satisfy almost every other need we have universally. So if you are going to say that they won’t work in education, you need to say why, and I don’t think “we don’t have a big market because of the subsidized competitor” works.

Personally I’m worried vouchers will as a demand-side subsidy increase prices. Supply-side subsidies are better.

Watson Ladd @147

“Private markets work in food, and toothpaste, and transportation, and satisfy almost every other need we have universally. So if you are going to say that they won’t work in education, you need to say why, and I don’t think “we don’t have a big market because of the subsidized competitor” works.”

The more than 100 responses below the OP point out a lot of reasons why education isn’t well suited to “the private market”. There is more than one consumers and they are not in the same position (child v. parent). The impact of the product may not become evident for years. Replacing the product is impossible (I can’t do 3rd grade again if it turned out to suck). The product isn’t scalable (My good school can’t teach a million kids) so some people will have no access to the good product. We don’t have a good way to ascertain the efficacy of the product at all. Especially when it comes to disentangling the effects of other factors which may impact the product’s value added.

Politically some people believe school is partially to inculcate all future citizens with a set of values and provide a common experience for everyone in society. While markets aren’t necessarily unable to do that (we could require certain standards be met by providers) the advocates for markets seem to be explicitly against standardizing the product as the whole point is to provide different experiences for different consumers.

Kidneystones @131:
But it was teachers themselves who elected to withdraw from teachers’ unions in Wisconsin.

This is analogous to holding the targets of voter suppression responsible for not voting.

The law passed by Scott Walker & Tea Party dominated legislature was designed to eviscerate public employee unions so that their members would see no purpose to belonging and quit. It made collective bargaining impotent, either by prohibiting it outright or restricting it to the narrowest of issues. It rewrote health care benefits and pensions to the detriment of public sector workers so that they would conclude that their unions could not protect them. It imposed ‘right to work’ to create free rider issues for unions as they struggled to maintain themselves.

Even under difficult conditions, one should fight back. Voters should make extraordinary efforts to vote, despite the obstacles placed in their paths. Union members should maintain their allegiance to the principle of solidarity, and fight together for a better day when such laws can be undone. Those of us who believe that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice because we do the bending will do that, out of the conviction that it will make a difference. But is it surprising that a good number do not? That was the whole point of the law, after all.

@ Watson Ladd, from my comment at 143: “The magic of the market will of course create another private school, but not quickly, and not of the same quality as the original; and a few years is a long time in the eductation of a child.”

If you assume some long enough period of time, of course you could have enough private schools to accommodate all the students; but lots of students will be left behind along the way, because you’ve chosen to fund benefits for some but not all of them. And if the end game is a network of better funded schools with sufficient density to accommodate all students, why not better funded public schools with sufficient density to accommodate all students?

“Private markets work in food, and toothpaste, and transportation, and satisfy almost every other need we have universally.”

This begs a good many questions. There is not a private market in food at all; what do you think the Farm Bill is if not public funding underwriting food production? Nor is there a private market in transportation – every aspect of modern transportation is subsidized with public funding. Ford does not make the roads, nor does Delta staff the airports and provide the air traffic control infrastructure. As to toothpaste, do you really think it is analogous to education?

Left-neoliberalism: find a genuine social problem. Tout markets as the solution. Accuse anyone who doesn’t like it and who isn’t actually poor of Not Caring. Rinse. Repeat. Been there, done that. Pas plus. Non merci.

Brett Dunbar
The case you are describing there might be evidence for a much more general conclusion, but it’s not evidence for the more specific claims you made earlier, and which were the subject of my question.

If you’ve got an instance (such as airports) where competition produced better results, it may do little or nothing to support a conclusion that competition will produce better results in another instance (such as schools), unless you have identified the series of events by which competition produces better results in the first instance, because that provides some basis for judging whether a similar series of events would be likely in the second instance. In your earlier comment, you described in detail the series of events you would expect on theoretical grounds, and that’s why I was asking for evidence of series of events of that kind in actual markets.

What you haven’t provided in the case of the two airports, Liverpool and Manchester, is evidence that: one was not as good as the other on the scores of cheapness, efficiency, and reliability; and the one that was not as good had slots for flights going begging while the other one had all its slots full and airlines begging for more; and the one that was not as good made difficult choices to improve its cheapness, efficiency, and reliability in order to attrace more custom from the airlines; and this cycle repeated itself until both airports attained the maximum possible cheapness, efficiency, and reliability. That’s the story you told about the consequences of market theory, so when I asked whether what you expected on theoretical grounds was reflected in actual markets, that’s the kind of story I was looking for.

“of course you could have enough private schools to accommodate all the students; but lots of students will be left behind along the way, because you’ve chosen to fund benefits for some but not all of them. And if the end game is a network of better funded schools with sufficient density to accommodate all students, why not better funded public schools with sufficient density to accommodate all students?”

This kind of quote seems to deeply fail to wrestle with the reality that lots of students are getting left behind along the way *right now* and have been for the last 50 years at least under the current public system.

How many years before that becomes a pertinent enough fact that you are willing to risk 5 or 10 or 15 years trying something different?

It’s a small thing relative to many of these issues, but one thing I really hate about both voucher and charter systems is the choice and contingency they burden me with. Learning about the leadership and curriculum at dozens of schools, strategizing and filling out applications, scheduling visits and interviews, waiting for acceptance notifications, appealing and reapplying, not to mention the enrollment decision itself, all to do it again in a few years… I hate every minute of it, and resent having to do it. For those wealthy enough, there are private consultants in charter-dominated metro districts who will manage the whole rigamarole. Maybe it’s utopian, but I dream of living in a little-to-no-choice world when it comes to basic services.

Corey Robin wrote something similar about healthcare, I believe.

Stan @154:

Your fundamental point is correct, but I would amend it. The issue of school segregation today is one of race and class in combination, unlike Jim Crow segregation. Jim Crow schools were segregated by race, but not by class: children of professional African-American families went to school with children of working class African-Americans and poor African-Americans.

In New York, which is now the most segregated state in the nation, schools have a combined segregation of race and class, where schools entirely populated by students of color and also schools with the highest concentrations of the most dire poverty.

When white middle class parents object to school integration (and this is a complicated picture, there are some white middle class parents who are actually pushing for more integrated schools as cities invert), they do not object to middle class students of color but poor students of color.

My three daughters are African-American. When we sent them to a good elementary public school in the gentrifying community of lower Park Slope some 17 years ago, they were greeted with open arms. African-American students who came with considerable stores of family cultural and intellectual capital were more than welcome. African-American students from the nearby projects were an entirely different story.

Watson Ladd at 147:

I live in Iowa, of course, and I’m here to tell you that “private markets work in food,” is absolutely false in the US. 501 million dollars a year in direct subsidy (disproportionately going to the largest concerns, naturally) to the state of Iowa alone and tens, probably hundreds of millions in indirect subsidies as well. (I don’t know what you hear elsewhere, but even the most diehard libertarian Republican gets misty-eyed over the environmental benefits of corn ethanol during the primary season, and promises to keep the tax money flowing.)

I drive and take planes, and I can tell you the same about transportation.

Vouchers may or may not work. As people have suggested, the empirical evidence isn’t clear yet. But what a lot of people–especially teachers–recognize is that vouchers are part of a concerted, ideologically driven effort, part of a larger effort articulated very clearly, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Sebastian H: “This kind of quote seems to deeply fail to wrestle with the reality that lots of students are getting left behind along the way *right now* and have been for the last 50 years at least under the current public system.”

Thank you! Since the point of my comment was to say that your proposed system – vouchers which land a small number of students in better schools while abandoning the rest to bad schools – does not actually solve the problem, which is that many students find themselves in bad schools, it seems we’ve reached agreement on that. Perhaps the *extra* taxpayer funds you’d like to spend on vouchers would be better spent on something that improves the lot of all students?

J-D:

“the question is ‘What is the best mechanism for allocating public funding for education?’, and parents are not better equipped than anybody else to answer the question.”

That’s some first grade obfuscation and red-herring. It equates the running of an enormous bureaucratic system with the decision that two or so parents make for their child. The later requires nothing more than the willingness and ability to read some reviews and educational results, and maybe talk to a few people — the former is an endeavor in an environment of information overload and full of perverse political incentives, more likely than not to lead to massive partial or total failures.

Another idea mentioned up-thread was that the real debate should be about *what* to teach to children, rather than how to fund education. This seems to miss that one important advantage of a voucher/choice based system is that it allows for experimentation, the result of which might be better ideas about how to educate various groups of children.

There are dangers here, the most important one to avoid being cronyism, the pillaging of state funds for nothing but sub-standard results. This does not seem to me like a very hard problem to solve: you put in some well thought-out standards (e.g. by including an allowance for the economic background of the children involved) and revoke the license or part of the ability to receive funds for the underperforming schools. Given that these are private schools, crocodile tears shed on behalf of substandard schools will largely be absent.

Layman, you’re being cryptic. Either you aren’t understanding your own links or I have no idea what you are trying to say. You links confirm exactly what I said–that the vast majority of education funds in California are collected at the state level and redistributed to the schools at the local level. I was responding to you when you said:

If that’s we’re going to do – have people who live in wealthier, better school districts pay for better schools in poorer school districts – why don’t we just get on with doing that? Why the complicated mechanism which by design can’t accommodate all the kids in those poor school districts anyway?

Again, that is exactly what California already does, and has done for decades. There are a very few (about 10% of schools) that can get funds larger than the state amount through various very arcane systems in the law, but 90% of the schools don’t get any significant money through those methods, and many of those are perfectly serviceably suburban schools. The inner city schools are still largely atrocious (except in places like SF where poor people literally cannot live nearby). The system you say you want instead of vouchers is the system California already has.

I’m wondering if you’re confusing local funding (i.e. the idea that local property taxes are earmarked for education through various byzantine laws in California) with California allocation control (the fact that California pools the vast majority of the money and doles it out to various schools at the state level).

@ 170 This is critical in my view. However, the schools that are failing have been failing for generations. It’s been some time since I had any/much direct contact with the victims of ‘great society’ failures, but the experts I knew then were quite clear about predicting teen pregnancies, drop-out rates, etc. as children were born into into inner-city families where the parents also suffered from failing schools. My (limited) understanding is that the same occurs too often among the rural poor.

It’s truly sad that the Democratic candidate did not even visit Wisconsin to at least pretend to care, whilst the Republican visited many of the rural communities ignored by Democrats. The truly messed-up part for me is that Democrats seem to have forgotten that raising up the down-trodden should be what politics is all about. If it’s not that, then it seems to be pure pork, which is what the corporate educators are too often offering as a ‘solution.’

If Democrats aren’t willing to roll-up their sleeves (remember that bygone expression?) and engage with working-class people as equals (yes, that!), I’m not sure the party will be able to avoid the abyss facing Labor.

J-D I wonder if you’re missing Harry’s point. You need to make your abstractions a bit more concrete.

Rich people can move to rich neighborhoods and make sure their children only have to deal with other rich children.

Poor people can’t move to rich neighborhood to do those things because they can’t afford the rich neighborhood (often because of various zoning rules which make the housing there unaffordable).

“It’s obviously impossible for everybody in the US to move to Madison in order to get access to schools there, but it’s not apparent from what you’ve written that the people you’re referring to are opposing poor people making the same choice they did to move to Madison.” This sentence especially needs attention to appropriate levels of abstraction.

“same choice” is deflecting a lot of thinking. Poor people cannot make the choice to spend more money than they have available to move to rich neighborhoods for any purpose. The definition of poor lends itself to “can’t spend that much money”. Therefore they don’t actually have that choice. This is a much stronger case than the idea that poor people make bad choices about eating for example (though they may be pressed for preparation time). In the case of moving to expensive neighborhoods, they literally do not have that choice available because not being able to buy really expensive things is highly correlated with being poor.

Sebastian H

Is that the point you think I’m missing? If that’s not it, what is the difference?

Experience shows that whenever some pundit rhapsodizes about the magisterial magnificence of “choice,” scams ensue.
Milton Friedman’s war on market regulation went under the rubric of “Free To Choose.” Invariably this so-called “freedom” boils down to poor people “choosing” to starve and rich guys “choosing” to build enormous mansions with the privatized profits they make by socializing the costs of a deregulated economy and a shredded social safety net.
Parents’ “freedom” to “choose” in the context of school vouchers obviously means that the bottom 99% of parents will be ‘free’ to have uneducated children because they can’t afford the cost of privatized schooling once public schools have gotten shut down, and rich parents will be “free” to have the cost of their ritzy private academies subsidized by a public permanently shut out of sending their children there.
Why didn’t Tyler Cowen just cut to the chase, and write a paean to the marvelous benefits American society would enjoy if poor people were free to sell their children into slavery to the rich? An attractive nine-year-old girl would surely offer considerable marginal value to many types of rich people, and the parents would enhance their marginal utility immensely if they were able to sell her as a sex slave. Why stop at the bogus “choice” of school vouchers? After all, don’t we want parents to be able to be fully Free To Chooseâ„¢?

Paul Davis

if you want to move away from the widely accepted US tenet of “equality of opportunity”, then you should say so. If not, acknowledge that spending on early childhood infrastructure has an enormous impact on “equality of opportunity” and should therefore be targetted appropriately toward that meta-goal.

In short: yes, the progressive agenda has always been that the rich should give up at least some of their wealth in order to increase the choices (and initial opportunity) for the poor. You’re free to disagree with that goal, but you should say so clearly if you do.

It is not clear to me in what way this is intended to be a response to what I wrote. What is it you think I mean, and what makes you think so?

Sebastian H: “You links confirm exactly what I said–that the vast majority of education funds in California are collected at the state level and redistributed to the schools at the local level.”

Indeed, just as they note that the basic problem in California is that the entire system is underfunded, with the result that California’s public schools are ranked in the bottom 20% in the nation. There isn’t enough money to go around, because relatively wealthy and powerful Californians in the 70s revolted against paying taxes for schools (among other things) and amended California’s constitution to constrain the state’s ability to raise revenue. If I’m suggesting that ‘raising enough revenue to fund all the schools equally and well’ is a better solution than ‘giving some kids vouchers’, offering up California as a counter-example misses the mark.

J-D “This inequality in available choices would be eliminated if the rich agreed to an equalisation of wealth.”

Oh is that all it takes? Why didn’t you just say so from the beginning? Doesn’t that sound just a little bit like pie in the sky libertarians for whom everything comes down to “we didn’t get rid of government yet, so I can’t talk about that”?

If you think we can’t address school failures until we’ve equalized enough wealth such that poor people can easily move into rich neighborhoods, you should be a lot clearer about that belief.

Layman, especially in a forum where we can’t respond easily to each other directly except over the space of days making clarification requests very difficult, it would be easier if you would explain what you think the point of your links are more clearly.

I responded to a point about local funding of schools by reminding that in most of the largest states (containing many of the very bad inner city schools) it isn’t done that way any more and hasn’t been for decades.

“Perhaps the problem here is that you really don’t understand how schools are funded in California? Or that the basic problem in California is that the schools are underfunded?”

With some basic links for authority. The problem is that those links showed EXACTLY what I said. Now if you wanted to agree with me, that local funding isn’t the big deal that it used to be in most of the larger states, and that we should focus on other areas like underfunding you could have said something like “You’re right, the local funding isn’t so much of an issue any more, I suspect it is underfunding”.

When we aren’t going to be able to get clarification for days, you need to be clear.

Per pupil California spending (adjusted for inflation) was up a bit more than 60% from 1970 to 2008. After the recession there was a small dip with a rebound in the last 2 years. But thumbnail sketch, 60% growth in per pupil spending after inflation, reflected in pretty much a straight line, so no one period seems to dominate. here . And to ward off another potential rabbit hole Bamoul’s ‘Cost Disease’ probably doesn’t explain that massive increase in funding, because it isn’t teacher’s salaries that are going up 60% in real terms over that time.

Now most of the statistics in your links show a huge drop in California rankings among the other states in per pupil spending as proof of underfunding. That is of course a positional arms race which can’t be won by all 50 states simultaneously, but even that aside, this fact suggests that other states have been increasing spending even more than California.

The problem with adding these facts to the analysis is that it strongly suggests that massive increases in per pupil spending over the last 40-50 years have not been paired with massive improvements in inner city schools.

This is a fact that your argument to spend more doesn’t deal with adequately, or really at all.

@155 Layman 12.06.16 at 4:47 pm:

As to toothpaste, do you really think it is analogous to education?

Though your question was directed at Watson Ladd, one difference comes immediately to mind:
Toothpaste can openly advertise claims of achieving greater whiteness.

Collin Street in #188 says: “People don’t make apropos-of-nothing statements…”

You, sir, have not reckoned with the Era of Trump.

You, sir, have not reckoned with the Era of Trump.

You joke, but it turns out that what I wrote doesn’t apply — inter alia — to people with narcissism.

Sebastian H: “Now most of the statistics in your links show a huge drop in California rankings among the other states in per pupil spending as proof of underfunding.”

Yet private schools in California spend, on average, some 30% more per student than do public schools. School districts with residents having similar incomes, unemployment rates, and economic conditions differ in per-student funding by very large amounts, so much so that school districts have sued the state over the funding model. It is not demonstrably the case that California has achieved equity in the distribution of school funding, or that California schools are well-funded, or that private schools there produce better results at on average lower costs. California is not an argument for diverting tax revenues into a voucher program which can by design only benefit a fraction of the kids who need educating.

Sebastian H: “Could you provide your source on this?”

Good grief, Sebastian, you haven’t offered a single source for anything you’ve said.

Average private school tuition in California:

K-12 – $13,020
High School – $18,088
Elementary – $10,306

http://www.privateschoolreview.com/tuition-stats/private-school-cost-by-state

Average public school spending per student in California:

K-12 – $9,595

http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html

“I don’t agree, but apply that to your side of the argument. We can stick with the status quo system where none of those additional kids are going to do better than now.”

Strawman alert.

Layman @ 200: I think you’d do better when countering Sebastian H’s point by providing median data on spending (preferably with std deviations too). As he notes, the average/mean gets skewed by schools that everyone agrees shouldn’t be considered as part of the comparison. I don’t agree with his perspective, but I don’t think that mean spending comparisons do much to rebut it.

The situation with the airports I was comparing the situation in the Northwest with two similar sized airports both independently owned and competing for custom. With the situation in the south-east where BAA had a near monopoly.

At the time of privatisation Manchester was a much better equipped larger capacity airport than Liverpool. Some years later Liverpool was bought by new management who built really nice new terminal and re named to Liverpool John Lennon airport (the only UK airport named after a person) It was able to grab traffic from Manchester and the two airports have been competing pretty fiercely for years now. It does show that you can have an effective market even if there are only two competitors.

What I was indicating was the basic line of reasoning by which competition might improve the quality of education given a few plausible. assumptions. It was a simple back of the envelope exercise.

“At the time of privatisation Manchester was a much better equipped larger capacity airport than Liverpool. Some years later Liverpool was bought by new management who built really nice new terminal and re named to Liverpool John Lennon airport (the only UK airport named after a person) It was able to grab traffic from Manchester and the two airports have been competing pretty fiercely for years now. It does show that you can have an effective market even if there are only two competitors.”

I hadn’t realised that Liverpool and Manchester airports offer exactly the same routes at the same times, or that they were the only airports in the north of England. Add in the fact that pricing for seats on flights is essentially made up flight by flight, and your argument is effectively gibberish.

Brett Dunbar,

My understanding was that food deserts are related to spatial planning where malls replaced main streets and corner stores, making the journey longer to purchase healthy foods and less easily to be accessed by active transport.

In terms of the Charter Schools discussion, last week I attended an information session on how the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme will work. For people not from Australia, this is a program being funded by a levy to provide funding for people with a disability, and the person with a disability has their disability and needs assessed and are granted an annual budget that they can spend on various disability related expenses meeting the criteria of the program. This will replace some of the disability services that themselves were replacements for the institutionalisation of people with a disability.

The government NDIS spokesman who was giving the information (along with two people with a disability) said that initially the government expected that the market would mature in 5 years, but after trials of the NDIS have revised that and now think 10 years is a more realistic time frame.

I imagine this would be similar with Charter Schools, it might take up to 10 years to get enough feedback and improve the initial Charter School programs. The feedback system for the NDIS trials was designed with a methodology inspired by Action Research collaboratively getting input from the people using the NDIS. I don’t know how the government in America is getting feedback on the Charter Schools but it would be possible to develop similar sort of feedback systems.

Layman, ““I don’t agree, but apply that to your side of the argument. We can stick with the status quo system where none of those additional kids are going to do better than now.”

Strawman alert.”

There hasn’t been any big push from your side of the debate for at least 10 years. And if you don’t count the No Child Left Behind Act (and with its focus on standardized testing which many on your side of the debate seem to hate I’m not sure you should but I don’t know where you personally come down on the issue) it has been more than 20 years. There is a reason why inner city parents go for vouchers and charters. They haven’t been seriously offered any hope of change other than that.

Regarding the other links. The private school average you provide is heavily weighted by the super-rich private schools (including boarding schools that are obviously going to have non standard expenses) that wouldn’t be served under vouchers or charters anyway. I can’t find a good median number anywhere. I will however note that in California charter schools spend about $1,000 less per pupil than standard California public schools so it clearly isn’t impossible. (California spending on education is byzantine. My understanding is that this is a comparison of ‘base funding’. ‘Categorical funding’ is where things like special needs comes in, which means that charges of charters screening out special needs students won’t cause that comparison to be off).

The other link is more interesting. First, you’re overdrawing my claim. I don’t claim perfectly equalized funding, I’m claiming highly centralized funding. It is well understood that there remain about 10% of schools who work the system really well or utilize various end runs to get better funding. But most of them don’t. Further, centralized spending definitely doesn’t imply equal spending. Certain schools will need more funding to succeed. I.e. some schools will have better funding per student BECAUSE of the low test scores in the school. This penetrates into even the top 10 schools of your link Taft, Klamath-Trinity, San Pasqual Valley, all show top spending per student because they have some of the lowest test scores. This shows up more clearly in the 10 lowest spending districts. They tend to be in more rural areas with lower costs of living for their teachers. 6/10 of them have test scores already in the top quarter. 9/10 of them are in the top half of test scores. Only one of them (Dixon Unified in Solano County) has both low spending and low test scores.

California is very much a system which is trying to distribute funding more based on need than the chance of location. The very richest 10% of school districts game the system, but there are whole tracts of middle class schools operating nearly entirely within the system that are doing well, and there a large number of inner city schools on the bottom (many of them getting more money than the middle class schools) that aren’t.

That’s the system we have. It already incorporates most of the features of the standard left-side critique of public education in the US. It doesn’t ELIMINATE the ability of the very richest districts to spend more money, but absolutely represents a huge centralization and attempt at aiming the money where it is needed.

It appears to work fine for the middle class. (The upper class as always makes sure the system works fine for them).

It doesn’t work well for the lower class, especially in cities.

Which again, is why the lower class and inner city parents are so dissatisfied with the status quo AND the current left-side answers.

Igor Belanov @205

The competition functions effectively even in a situation where the market would seem likely to be pretty illiquid. Airports sell to airlines, the airlines compete for customers on both price and service. So they can offer better service to their customers if the airports offer them good service. This led to notably higher passenger satisfaction than seen in areas where there was a monopoly.

The notable difference in passenger satisfaction and pricing was one of the reasons the competition commission report in 2009 recommended that BAA be forced to sell several airports.

Brett Dunbar

I don’t recall that I did.

Referential failure. You don’t recall that you did what?

I was giving the theoretical argument about how competition could improve standards given some plausible assumptions.

No, that’s not true, and it’s untrue in a way that is critical to the issue. You did not state the assumptions that must be true for the general theoretical analysis to be valid. Without a clear statement of what those assumptions are, it’s not possible to know whether they’re true in the particular case under discussion.

There doesn’t seem to be any good reason to assume that parents don’t generally want the best for their children and have at least a decent grasp of the relative quality of local schools.

There doesn’t seem to be any good reason to assume that parents have a decent grasp of the relative quality of local schools, whatever you mean (and I can’t guess) by ‘relative quality’ in this context.

There doesn’t seem to be any good reason to assume that parents don’t generally want the best for their children

What’s the reason for thinking they do?

“How do parents assess the relative quality of local schools?”

Probably observation, personal interactions, reputation, and by knowing other people with kids in the school.

An equally interesting question is “how does anyone assess the relative quality of local schools?”. We’ve apparently totally given up on standardized tests. Perhaps it is completely unknowable?

We’ve apparently totally given up on standardized tests. Perhaps it is completely unknowable?

Don’t ever change, Sebastian

WLGR@218

I think you may be selling poor parents short. Yes, the additional burden of getting information is significant, but to go back to my example of Boston, a lot of the charter schools are oversubscribed with applications from parents desperate to get their kids into better schools.

One thing about competition is that not everyone has to invest a lot of effort in finding things out. A lot of people free-ride. If there’s a neighborhood where parents talk to each other, information probably gets around pretty easily.

I think the case for the ACA over single-payer is a lot weaker, because you’re not starting with an unsuccessful system.

From the point of view of people skeptical about parents knowing, how do states know either?

I can’t explain it to you, because:
+ it’s misconstrued on your part
+ your ability to comprehend disagreement — and thus to engage productively with attempts to correct you or even give you meaningful feedback — is severely limited by significant reading-comprehension problems: you have a problem with black-and-white thinking. You read a person’s attempt to communicate the basis of their disagreement far more broadly than it actually is intended to be [you think that people disagree more than they actually do], and then dismiss their concerns — or, rather, your exaggerated misunderstanding of their concerns — as obviously overblown.

As we see right here:
A number of commenters seem highly skeptical of parents’ ability to discern anything important about school quality.

It’s not true! It’s an exaggeration — a distortion, a misrepresentation — of real and reasonable positions. You’re dismissing what you read because it seems obviously wrong to you… but the obviousness of the wrongness exists solely as a result of the limits of your ability to actually understand what other people are telling you.

[… but that limited ability also applies to this, here, which… means you’re fucked, I guess. You ain’t getting better.]

Remember, we design social structures to minimise the negative consequences of worst-case scenarios, and the worst-case scenario for “parental abuse” is, you know, pretty gods-damned vile. Turns out that average random strangers are vastly preferable to unfettered parental care.

You seem to have missed the myriad of child abuse cases that have come to light in the past decades affecting just about every institution dealing with children and young adults. This was abuse on a large scale, conducted and covered up in a systematic manner.

As an example of the difficulty of seeing agreement/disagreement, J-D didn’t sound like someone who thought that the government had trouble discerning bad schools and good, but now makes it clear that he thinks governments and parents are about equally good (or bad) at it.

Re-reading his comments I can see how they fit with that framework, but it wasn’t clear that was the framework until he explicitly said so.

unless we have a dictatorship

Like Finland?

‘Can get it through the US democracy’ is not really the same thing as ‘requires a dictatorship’. Otherwise we may have to conclude that abiding by the Paris accord requires a dictatorship.

It’s perfectly legal to run a private school in Finland, you just can’t charge tuition, or be more selective than the public schools.

Sebastian H: ‘I’m not sure where the zones of disagreement are in this discussion. They seem to range from “there really isn’t a problem with public schools” expressed on the other thread to “they are a disaster area”.’

Can you point to the particular statement(s) of view on ‘the other thread’ which you summarize as ‘there really isn’t a problem with public schools’?

Sebastian H @ 228
I wish people who believe that standard reforms are likely to succeed would wrestle more openly with why they believe they have failed so far and how this time will be different.

Here are a few possible reasons why they may have failed so far in CA, some of which were explicitly or implicitly addressed by commenters on this and the related threads:

(a) Reforms are being instituted too late in children’s lives to allow them to close the literacy and developmental gap which exists by age 5; I believe the ideal age for remediation/intervention to begin is 2 (maximum), which is pretty much supported by developmental psychology. Mayor de Blasio has spearheaded pre-K public programs for all in NYC; this is the right direction, I think, although I haven’t looked into details.

(b) Though large increases have been allotted to some districts through redistribution systems like California’s (this is, of course, one of the most centralized of the U.S. state systems), the increases to inner city schools do not close the gap between parental discretionary spending. Chapter I of Duncan and Murnane (Whither Opportunity?) cites discretionary spending by parents in the top/bottom quintiles – by 2006, it had reached a differential of ~ 6700 per year, per child. To match inner-city real dollars privately spent on children’s education and enrichment activities (music lessons, sports programs, summer camp, travel, etc.), the state would need to nearly double what it allots to inner city LA schools per child – say, 17,000 vs 10,000 or so.

(c) Large numbers of non-English speakers in LA schools, esp. primary schools; although Prop 227 was essentially repealed in 2014 by Prop 58, the results will not appear for a good many years. Prop 227 pretty much shattered the educational chances of an entire school generation (12-13 years) of non-native speakers.

(d) Continuing high rates of teacher and administrator burn-out, and concomitant high turnover in staff. A school attempting to reform itself needs several – sometimes many – years, and continuity in staffing is crucial during the introductory period.

(e) The switch to a different testing system as a result of the introduction of the Common Core may be skewing results; several cycles of testing will be needed before this possible effect is clarified.

Finally, perhaps we should consider that there is a problem extraneous though closely linked to the ongoing failure of inner-city schools, namely

(f) poverty
I searched “poorest LA County zip codes” and discovered 90 consecutive zip codes (90001-90), 44 of these in LA itself, with MHI of 32,000 or less. That’s a lot of poverty, across many neighborhoods – it’s too much for the schools to deal with.

Schools are being asked to make up for all the disadvantages poor children are subject to. They just can’t, and no amount of reform will make them capable of shouldering this burden. Schools reflect economic inequality, they do not create it.

That said, strategic reforms can address some of these issues. Reforms should, imho, target very young children (the younger the better); they should include long days (up to 12 hours); they should include extended and/or staggered school years to provide extra-curricular and enrichment activities, recreation, excursions (the things middle-class parents provide through discretionary spending) and address the “loss in knowledge” experienced by inner-city children in summers; teachers at inner-city schools should be given substantial incentives to commit to minimum tenures at their schools – to name just a few possible reforms which in various combinations might help some.

Needless to say, such reforms are costly, and it’s hard for me to imagine any actor other than the polity itself undertaking them – and even that would require almost superhuman political will.

This is especially true as the link does NOT talk about keeping the middle class from moving which is the statement I made which engels is allegedly responding to. This looks to me like a case of ‘charity for people I agree with, none for those I hate’, a classic expression of the tribalist kind of thinking that is tearing this nation apart.

Oh noes I’m responsible for Trump. Fwiw I’m not opposed to middle class people moving house, I’m opposed to private education and I want a fully free, public and comprehensive system under democratic control with city-wide lotteries and busing to prevent segregation (and I guess targeted funding to address any remaining/regional inequalities). I’m sure it won’t fix everything but it would be a step in the right direction, which is mych more than can be said for further neoliberal ‘choice’-based ‘reforms’ or attempts to fix the system that ignore the elephant in the room, that the people in charge of it aren’t even using it themselves. And no more standardised testing please.

School’s out.

Howard Frant

Well, I don’t know nuthin’ about education like the people on this thread do. But I live and vote in Massachusetts (USA), and there’s very strong evidence that kids in Mass. inner cities (though not elsewhere in Mass.) learn a *lot* more in charter schools than in public schools. And I think, contra Engels, that this means they will do better in life without making someone else worse off. And so I think it is a damned shame that we voters just defeated a proposal to lift a cap on the number of charter schools– basically, the voters in the suburbs just condemned poor minority kids to remain trapped in bad schools.

In that case, what would you think about a proposal to transfer all the kids from public schools to charter schools and close down all the public schools?

I mean, if charter schools are so much better than public schools, how do you justify condemning any kids to stay in public schools?

For some reason (oh, for an editing function) only the first paragraph of Sebastian posts was placed in italics. It should be the first two paragraphs, or everything that follows make no sense:

Sebastian @238:
Layman, “Can you point to the particular statement(s) of view on ‘the other thread’ which you summarize as ‘there really isn’t a problem with public schools’?” I can’t. I was horribly wrong. It is on this thread #170 by Leo Casey which begins with “I want to push back on one continuing assumption that runs through a number of the comments: that it is self-evident that there are large numbers of “failing” public district schools, and that these failing schools are not closed.”… If you believe these children can’t be helped by schools.

This misrepresents my position, and egregiously so. I have spent my adult professional life working to provide kids living in poverty with the very best public schools possible, and I have been at it, through thick and thin, for over three decades. The notions that there “isn’t a problem” with public schools and that children living in poverty “can’t be helped by these schools” are anathema to me.

And even a cursory reading of what I have contributed to these threads would make that clear. The actual comment in question ends with my declaration that there are occasions when it is necessary to close a school that has been so damaged by institutional neglect, bureaucratic maladministration and the sheer weight of the problems imposed upon it that it cannot right itself, even with all of the right resources and supports. A fresh start may not only be needed, but actually do good — provided that one addresses the issues which led to the school’s collapse. And in inner city and poor rural schools, that means addressing the issues associated with concentrations of dire poverty.

I posted in these threads a link to a published article of mine — newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2015/01/17/the-charter-school-challenge/ — which provides an extensive critique of “actually existing” public district schools and charter schools. The thought processes that could transform that argument into the position that there is “no problem” with existing schools is beyond my comprehension.

This sort of misreading is not idiosyncratic: it is the standard response of “school choice” partisans to arguments that raise issues of childhood poverty in education. There is a now well established pattern of advocates such as Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, Heritage and Cato, declaring not simply that poverty is no obstacle to educational success, but even contending that it is the schools serving poor kids that are the cause of poverty, on the presupposition that the schools — and not decades of neglect and worse on childhood poverty — doom these children to continued lives of poverty. “You will never fix poverty in America,” Klein is fond of saying, “until you fix schools.” Indeed, the prime backers of the school choice movement, from Wall Street hedge funders to the Walton Foundation of Walmart, have something of a vested interest in a worldview which finds the source of poverty in public schools, rather than in market dominated government policy and their own economic activity. This is a voluntarism on the scale of Mao’s cultural revolution, and would be recognized as such if it emanated from the left. But right wing utopianism gets a pass.

The Manichean dualism of this thinking is such that it can not imagine that addressing issues of childhood poverty and improving schools that serve children living in poverty need to go on in tandem. Consequently, raising issues of childhood poverty is translated as statements that there are “no problems” in schools and children living in poverty “can’t be helped” by schools. The poverty of your imagination does not make me into a “defender of the status quo.” There are reform alternatives to your laissez-faire market utopias.

Two last points:
First, school choice programs — charter schools and voucher programs — have been in place across the United States for many years. They are part of the “status quo” and they have a record that must be evaluated and defended on grounds more substantial than first principles of customer satisfaction and consumer sovereignty. Among other things, one must address the fact that market mechanisms (and some very visible hands as well) sort students in ways that create distinct advantages for charters and voucher schools in terms of the concentrations of poverty in their student demographics. Just this week, the NYT published an article demonstrating that NYC charter schools enrolled many fewer homeless students than NYC district public schools. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/nyregion/new-york-charters-enroll-fewer-homeless-pupils-than-city-schools.html And homelessness is, of course, the most severe form of poverty, with the greatest impact on education. It is well-established in the research literature that charter schools enroll fewer English language learners and fewer students with special needs, and that those students with special needs that are enrolled have the least severe disabilities.

Second, the notion that there is some “standard” reform that has been tried and found wanting rests not on an actual investigation, but on lazy presuppositions. It has been at least three and half decades, since the start of Reaganism, since the direction in public policy on childhood poverty has been regressive. And the evidence for the period when it was taken seriously, during the Great Society and desegregation era, is that it makes a positive difference. Moreover, the primary reform for improving schools by abating the effects of childhood poverty through the provision of social and health services — community schools — is quite promising, and has been tried on a much smaller scale than school choice programs.

” without competing with in zero-sum games for finite social roles (eg. uni places or jobs),”
If you think employment is a zero-sum game for finite social roles, then I really don’t want you in charge of education.

Leo, I’m confused, but I don’t want to misread you twice.

You seem to say: yes there is a problem with public schools, it is the poverty-stricken children who attend them.

But that isn’t a problem with *the public school*, that is a problem with the *environment in which some public schools inhabit*.

You seem to be saying something along the lines of: yes public schools have low test scores and other bad things that we can measure at the school output level, but it isn’t a problem with the schooling and the structure of the school administration or teaching. It is a problem with the poverty. (Which presumably is a big part of your explanation of why we can throw huge and increasing amounts of money to schools and not see a dent).

Second, the notion that there is some “standard” reform that has been tried and found wanting rests not on an actual investigation, but on lazy presuppositions. It has been at least three and half decades, since the start of Reaganism, since the direction in public policy on childhood poverty has been regressive.

Again, you don’t seem to be talking about the public schools at all here. (Which is good because most of education policy takes place at a much lower level than the federal government, so it wouldn’t make sense if you were talking about the schools themselves)

And the evidence for the period when it was taken seriously, during the Great Society and desegregation era, is that it makes a positive difference. Moreover, the primary reform for improving schools by abating the effects of childhood poverty through the provision of social and health services — community schools — is quite promising, and has been tried on a much smaller scale than school choice programs.

And a third time you are not talking about the public schools themselves and reforms to be taken to improve schooling, but rather attacking poverty.

Which is fine. It is certainly a useful point of view to say “look the problem isn’t the schools themselves, it is the poverty environment that the schools are in” and try to attack the problem that way.

But that is what I attributed to you, and what you strongly reacted against, so I’m not understanding what you are saying.

Yes, Gareth, there is an infinite supply of jobs in a capitalist economy for anyone who truly wants them as all right-wingers know (except when they’re demanding we prostrate ourselves in gratitude before the Job Creators) Anyhoo I’m afraid I really must be going—do be careful where you point that musket of yours old chap I’m worried your eyesight may no longer be twenty-twenty…

(And just for the record I mostly agree with what John’s saying too but I think that segregated schools are [a] a significant evil in themselves [b] a difficult to quantify but pretty important contributor to the current ‘political reality’.)

Some people seem to misunderstand me as taking sides on the question of charter or public. On the contrary, I don’t think there’s a definite answer to this question. In the study I cited, which *only* covered Massachusetts, there were big gains to inner-city kids in charter schools. There weren’t to kids in suburban schools. I was asking, shouldn’t we at least let the inner-city charter schools expand to meet demand? Do we really want to condemn poor kids to bad education (and thus further poverty) for the sake of abstract principle, because they had a bad draw in the lottery for their school?

But there’s no particular reason why that should apply to suburban schools. In fact a lot of the characteristics of successful inner-city charters (strict discipline, uniforms) are things that there’s probably not much interest in in the suburbs. As I noted, this would give us a two-track educational system, but that’s what we have now, and at least this way kids in both tracks would get educated.

I don’t think we can draw any conclusions from this study about charters outside Massachusetts. It’s an empirical question.

Could Mass. public school imitate charter schools and have the same success? Possibly, and that would be great. I’m not looking at “choice” as an end in itself.

J-D

In that case, what would you think about a proposal to transfer all the kids from public schools to charter schools and close down all the public schools?

In the case of Boston or Fall River, that would probably be a net gain. In the case of Newton or Brookline, definitely not (and the parents would scream bloody murder).

But why bother doing this? Why not just lift the caps and let things sort themselves out?

I mean, if charter schools are so much better than public schools, how do you justify condemning any kids to stay in public schools?

Once again, I’m not making any sweeping claims about charter schools in general.

But that’s exactly the question, yes. How do you justify condemning kids to stay in inferior schools? Provisionally, I’m willing to leave it to parents’ choice. But that may not be right.

Cranky Observer

There’s a lot of evidence that charter schools founded by hardworking, dedicated, and often selfless people can improve education for the underserved for 2-4 years, particularly if they are allowed to screen out the most difficult students and use the purportedly failed public school system as a backstop. There is less evidence that they can continue to do so after 5 years, when the original founding group burns out or just ages out, and no evidence at all that they can continue to do so for 10 years (not to even mention 150 years)

Well then, we’ll just have to get more evidence, won’t we? I don’t think we need expect an particular institutional arrangement to last 150 year.

Engels

They will do ‘better’ in lift without appropriating a disproportionate share of resources (eg. land) that other people need, without competing with in zero-sum games for finite social roles (eg. uni places or jobs), without contributing disproportiontately to problems (eg. CO2 emissions) that harm others, without helping to sustain a system (eg. the US state) that victimises/tortures/imprisons/murders others, without exploiting the labour (eg. in third world sweatshops) of others. Let me guess: they’re hermits who live on a boat and grow their own iPods in an indoor micro-farm?

Yeah, you’re right. Let’s just leave them poor.

John Quiggin

OK, let’s do something about inequality and poverty. Meanwhile, let’s see if there are things we do to get them better education. Which of course is one thing we can do about poverty and inequality

Actually it turns out that spending more money on education does in fact improve it. All the rest is down to political will; if we wanted to, we could make education better by, you guessed it, spending money on it. But that would require the upper middle class and the rich to pay more in taxes, which is why it won’t happen. Alas.

Yeah, you’re right. Let’s just leave them poor.

I really don’t wanna get all Colin Street on your ass, Howard, but do you really think those are the only two options here?

Howard Frant

I’m not really sure what you’re saying here. That some schools will always be better than others?

More or less — subject to the qualifications ‘assuming the continuation of the basic structural features of institutional education’ and ‘for some value of the word “better” which merits investigation’.

The question here is whether schools will provide kids with the basic skills they need to get by.

Is that the question here or, rather, should it be? How can we even attempt to answer that question without first figuring out what are the basic skills kids need to get by, and if we want to ensure that all kids are provided with the basic skills they need to get by, why should we assume that schools are at the centre of the answer?

For example, reading and writing. You have obviously mastered those at a pretty high level. Shouldn’t we give kids the chance to learn those at least at a moderate level?

Yes, absolutely! Everybody should have the chance to learn to read and write. Does something make you think that not everybody does?

Given your views, you should be supporting diversity in school types and school philosophies.

Possibly, but not certainly not without qualification. Some school types and some school philosophies are harmful to children (more than others are). And, as I mentioned previously, giving everybody at least one good choice should be a higher priority (which is important when allocating finite public funding) than giving people multiple choices.

Also, I draw your attention to my first comment: I am grateful that my daughter had available to her, and took advantage of, some choice within our government school system — without voucher funding and without charter schools.

If you’re looking for Summerhill in Massachusetts, I think you’re far more likely to find it in a charter school than in a public one.

Well, I wouldn’t be looking for Summerhill in Massachusetts, because the Sudbury Valley School is already there, and has been since before charter schooling. Were you not aware of that?

But I’m curious—why do you say that about charter schools? Is it because they are neoliberal and therefore soul-crushing and evil?

No, not at all.

What I wrote was ‘I can’t find any reason to expect that an expansion of charter schooling will have this effect’, with ‘this effect’ referring back to my earlier description of making the experience of schooling less harmful to children, particularly children at ‘inferior’ schools. You want to know why I wrote that? I wrote that I can’t find any reason to expect it because I can’t find any reason to expect it. If you know of any such reason, please do draw my attention to it.

@ 242 Thank you for this and other informed comments. I’m very interested in why these schools succeed, where public schools fail. I’m also willing to buy into the idea that the driver for success is the involvement of informed parents and educators. The energy and commitment these individuals are willing to bring to this project seems very likely to align with the presence of their own kids in these schools. In an ideal world there would be no need for such schools. All schools would provide quality education in a free and equal society where everyone prospers and nobody is poor. The arguments that we should not support schools such as those you describe is absurd. We can support public schools and public education and charter schools. As Leo and Harry state clearly, we should regard the promises of corporate K-12 education with a great deal of suspicion. Local folks organizing local charter schools deserve all our support for as long as they need it.

Opponents of school choice seem to assume that the quality of education at a school is fixed and that all the schools are full (for example if the education authority adjusts the permitted class size so that the number of places provided matches the size of the age group) so all that varies is the distribution of pupils across schools. Therefore having choice means that the wealthy get to monopolise the good schools.

Supporters of choice tend to assume less bureaucratic control so that capacity is somewhat greater than the number of pupils in the age group so that parental choice means that the vacancies end up concentrated at the lowest quality schools. Which are then given a strong signal that they are doing badly. While popular oversubscribed schools can increase capacity. The school themselves have to determine how they improve quality. If they don’t they close.

Brett @ 263:

Supporters of choice tend to assume less bureaucratic control so that capacity is somewhat greater than the number of pupils in the age group…

… well, that certainly was how it worked out with airline deregulation, eh?

One last intervention, and then I am done with this thread (I keep promising myself.) I want to take a moment deconstructing the study [http://www.nber.org/papers/w17332.pdf] Howard Frant cites @97 as strong evidence that urban Massachusetts charters (primarily from Boston) are outperforming district public schools. That exercise is worthwhile because it points to the importance of close, critical readings of all research claims on politically contentious questions such as charter/district school performance demonstrate.

In the case of this study, the following seemingly innocuous description of method is actually quite important. The authors write:
We attempted to collect lottery data for the set of Massachusetts charter schools serving middle and high school grades and meeting a set of pre-specified eligibility criteria… To be eligible for our analysis, schools had to accept students in the relevant entry grades (4th-7th grade for middle school and 9th grade for high school). We excluded closed schools and alternative schools serving non-traditional populations (usually students at risk of dropping out). We also excluded schools that opened after the 2009-2010 school year. The resulting set of eligible schools includes 27 of the 54 charters serving middle school grades and eight of 37 schools serving high school grades. Three eligible schools serve both middle and high school grades, so there are 32 eligible campuses. Some eligible schools are not included in the lottery analysis; some were under-subscribed, while others failed to keep sufficient lottery records. The final sample of over-subscribed schools with usable records includes 16 middle schools and six high schools.

1. Note that this study does not examine all urban charter schools, but less than 40% of them — 22 out of 54+. (The denominator is greater than 54, as the authors exclude charter schools serving at risk student populations and charter schools that were closed some time during the years covered by the study, but don’t tell us how many schools fell into this category.)

2. These 22 schools were selected simply on the basis of fitting the analytical design of the paper’s study. Massachusetts charter schools admit students based on lottery, and the paper studied those schools which had sufficient numbers of lottery applicants over the course of a number of years to compare the academic performance of lottery participants who were admitted to the charter school and and the academic performance of lottery participants who were not admitted and attended a district public school. This design, the authors argue, produces random selection.

3. No argument is made that these 22 schools were representative of the larger universe of urban charter schools in Massachusetts. In fact, they were not. By excluding from their sample schools which were “under-subscribed” (that is, did not have sufficient numbers of lottery applicants to allow for comparison), the authors left out the schools for which there was the least demand — which also were, not surprisingly, the lowest performing charter schools. By excluding schools that failed to keep “sufficient lottery records,” the authors left out the most poorly managed schools — which were also among the lowest performing charter schools. By excluding schools that closed, the authors left out the charter schools that had had such severe academic or financial issues that they had been shut down. And by excluding schools that served at risk populations, the authors left out the charter schools with the greatest concentration of students living in poverty, students with special needs and English Language Learners. The minority of all charter schools that were included in the study were the highest performing charter schools.

3. Given the design of the study, these schools were compared to the entire universe of district public schools, since there were no restrictions on the district public schools that unsuccessful lottery participants could attend.

4. If we grant for purposes of the argument that all else in the paper is sound research, what we have — at the very best — is a comparison between the highest performing urban Massachusetts charter schools and the entire universe of district public schools. That tells us nothing about the comparative performance of the urban charter school sector as a whole, any more than a comparison between the highest performing district schools and the entire universe of charter schools would tell us something about the comparative performance of all district schools.

No one should be basing education policy on such a research base.

@268
Yes, given the high level of abstraction of the discussion thus far, it’s worth remembering that there’s a huge practical and political difference between charter schools and vouchers.

That’s not the takeaway from the excerpt engels@268 posted (with link). See the latest:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/us/politics/betsy-devos-how-trumps-education-nominee-bent-detroit-to-her-will-on-charter-schools.html?mabReward=R2&recp=5&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&region=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine

What the nominee for Sec of Education supports is for-profit charters, and she has proposed shutting down Detroit’s public school system entirely and turning it over to charters. She is opposed to any form of oversight/accountability.

Howard Frant

For example, reading and writing. You have obviously mastered those at a pretty high level. Shouldn’t we give kids the chance to learn those at least at a moderate level?

Yes, absolutely! Everybody should have the chance to learn to read and write. Does something make you think that not everybody does?

At a moderate level? Yes, the test scores of inner-city kids.

Did you give any thought to why I emphasised the word ‘chance’? (please note, however, that when I used it I was consciously quoting your use of it).
I am unable to ride a bicycle. This does not demonstrate that I have not had the chance to learn to ride a bicycle. My late father never learned to swim. That does not demonstrate that he never had the chance to learn to swim.
Likewise, the undisputed fact that some people are illiterate is not a demonstration that they did not have the chance to learn to read and write.

(I hope I haven’t messed up my use of tags; if I have this comment may prove hard to follow.)

Howard (@270):

there are “good” (i.e. successful) schools, some of these are charter schools, parents want their children to attend good schools.

even if the charter schools are better than average, it doesn’t follow from this that increasing the number of charter schools will increase the average quality of all schools. unless you can do this, “choice” is not a useful means to an end.

of course it’s prevailing market doctrine that individual choice drives improved provision, but this doesn’t always work. if good schools are good because of the intake they attract, and if non-standard schools are inherently more likely to be good because parents who care enough to jump through the hoops to get their children into them tend to be the kind of parents who will be able to provide a supportive learning environment, then increasing the number of said schools is likely to do nothing to improve education overall, particularly for those children whose parents can’t/won’t provide that environment.

J-D

Poor urban kids are less able to read and write well than middle-class suburban kids. I think this is because they have less opportunity to learn to read and write well. If I’m wrong, then please explain.

Colin Street

I’m not sure that’s worth responding to, but obviously “agree with me” means “agree with what I wrote.”

Paul

Right, but the study I cite addresses this by comparing kids who are randomly selected from those who apply to charter schools.

I’m not sure that’s worth responding to, but obviously “agree with me” means “agree with what I wrote.”

In general I have to say I don’t agree with you 100%, which I guess means that I disagree with you. And that this is true of, well, everybody, no? So “do you agree with me” never tells you anything.

Fundamentally you’re asking the wrong question:
+ “agree with [you]” isn’t a category I work with, so it’s not a useful categorisation; this bit I think you’re clear on.
+ dividing the world into “agree with you” and “disagree with you” collapses all disagreement together: in particular it collapses “disagrees with you because they’re wrong” and “disagrees with you because you’re wrong” together. Spotting your own mistakes is hard enough at the best of times.

[the things I’m telling you are conceptual and approach errors you are making. It makes no sense to you, because it doesn’t fit in with the conceptual framework you have; once you’ve understood my point, though, your framework will change and it’ll all be trite and obvious.]

I don’t remember anyone on CT arguing that maintenance grants for lower income families should be scrapped. Who was arguing for that?

Scrapping the grants was recent whereas the debates about fees were about a decade ago but the CT position on the second (markets are the only fair arrangement because individuals [esp those who we expect to be relatively privileged] should foot the bill for developing their own human capital without recourse to public funds) seems to lead fairly naturally to the governments position in the first. I guess there was never a CT post specifically about grants one way or the other—apologies for suggesting otherwise.

The way that the higher education loan system in the UK works is that repayment is linked only to income and the existence of an outstanding balance. The size of the balance has no effect. As roughly 50% of graduates aren’t expected to pay off before the balance is automatically written off after thirty years they are totally unaffected. To actually pay the loan off at thirty years you are looking at an annual income of about £70,000, not a group who need a subsidy even if their parents were poor. For it to make much difference you are looking at an income of £100,000 or so then you repay significantly before thirty years.

Extending the higher education loan system to further education should improve low income access to financial support compared to grants. The grants were partly discretionary while the loans are a right. The Student Loan Company is obliged to provide the loans to any student on a qualifying course. While with grants the parents might be expected to meet some of the costs.

engels @ 284:

The original justification for “free” higher education that I am familiar with went something like this: society as a whole benefits when appropriately qualified people have the opportunity to get as much education as is either required or possible so that they can enter careers that benefit society.

It isn’t clear that the dustman is subsidizing the doctor; the dustman’s family has helped to subsidize the doctor, perhaps, but in a way that reflects the progressivity of the tax system in effect. And it might have gone the other way: it could have been the dustman’s sister that studied to become a doctor, while the doctor ended up as a janitor.

This sort of thing is just another example of how economic insecurity pushes people to pay too much attention to specific examples of “inequity” within a system designed to pay off globally and long term, rather than being free of cases that could be argued to be problematic. A well-functioning society is not going to try to micro-manage outcomes and destinies and payoffs. Make people feel insecure and they start noticing and complaining about small-scale and local-level details which really ought to be ignored because the system is designed to function whether they occur or not.

Paul, thanks, that’s how I see it too I think.

When mechanisms (eg, a graduate tax) are available to you that enable you to redistribute from the big (financial) winners from public investment in higher ed to others, I don’t see why you wouldn’t do that.

Imo This is what Paul Davis rightly calls micro-management above. Fairness demands that stock-brokers should be taxed more heavily than nurses. Does it demand that graduate-stock-brokers be taxed more heavily than equally filthy rich non-graduate-stock-brokers who pulled themselves up into stock-broking by their own braces as it were? I suspect most people would say fairness does not demand this and I also think it is petty and at a deep level buys into a neoliberal conceptualisation of education as an individual human capital purchase. (And to be clear pace Brett Dunbar I think the UK system if fees and loans differs greatly from a graduate tax, not least in its deterrent effect on poorer students.

Harry @ 288:

I don’t have a clear answer to your final question because I’m conflicted between the view of higher ed that I grew up with in the UK and the system that I understand after 27 years living in the US.

In the former system, higher education was a more-or-less free thing made possible from local education authority taxes and limited to a small percentage of people believed (rightly or wrongly) to be the best candidates for jobs/careers that would benefit from the education.

In the current US system, higher education is viewed more as a universal thing, that ideally everyone should participate in to some level, with differentiation occuring via the types of colleges attended and types of awards conferred.

The (old) UK system legitimized the idea that, since society was (mostly) funding students, it could also decide what it would fund them to study (in reality it didn’t have to do this much, since such a small percentage of people actually attended university). The current US system echoes the usual blather about a “free market” system identifying what majors are required to be available at a given capacity, based on individuals’ own choices and preferences.

I can’t pick a single one of these systems as the one that we should be discussing, so I don’t have a single, coherent answer.

I’d like to know more about the ethos and principles behind, for example, the German system of “free” higher education (or the French one, for that matter)

experience seems to indicate that dismantling universal entitlements in favour of means-testing tends to lower it. (For the record, I’m sympathetic to targeting resources in a redistributive direction within a universal system [e.g. extra funding for disadvantaged students at school or uni] but strongly against introducing fees for what used to be free public services on the pretext that it frees up ‘limited’ government resources for redistribution.)

So this is not a matter of principle for you, but one of political trust? If you genuinely expected that the resources really would be shifted to early childhood education and concentrated on disadvantaged kids, and would be stable for a long period, you’d be ok with it?

End-of-the-day… on average, the people who will pay for their own education or pay for their children’s education… you’re going to get a less-competent cohort of graduates than you would if the resources were taken in taxes or whatever and given to scholarship kids.

Market-solutions beg the question of resource allocation and inequality, no?

[“if you have rich parents you will, as a practical matter, be subject to lower admission standards” is not something I can support under normal circumstances. I’m willing to tolerate it — you pick your battles — but any sort of positive words for the idea, that’s not passing my mouth.]

Although called a loan and having some legal structure of a loan the current UK system is for practical purposes a universal free system paid by bonds funded by a graduate tax. A free system which pretty much anyone with decent A levels can study pretty much any subject they want. It is far more socially inclusive than the old discretionary grants.

The SLC loans will pay the full tuition charged (there are price controls) and in most cases living expenses (unless the accommodation costs are very high). Repayment is based only on income not outstanding loan. The SLC sells the debt on at a fairly sharp discount. Around 70% of the debt is expected to be paid before the outstanding balance is written off. The risk is bourne by the bondholders and assumed at the time the bond is sold so the state has no incentive to alter the terms. Effectively the studies of those students who don’t have high in incomes are subsidised by those who do. With the bondholders taking the risk that the loans don’t pay off.

Engels @ 294

The UK loan system basically does 1, 2 and 3. The entitlement to the loans is universal while the repayment system is progressive across most incomes. Although it does become mildly regressive at very high incomes as the entire balance is paid off ending liability early.

The repayment is in practice a 9% income with a minimum threshold of £21,000 per annum. If you earn less than £21,000 then you pay nothing. If you earn £22,000 you pay 9% on £1,000 which is £90.